Two Products Twitter should build.

Yesterday I wrote about what Twitter should do, following their disappointing results from last quarter, to acquire and keep more users and build a differentiated experience.

I hit on two key themes, the personal interest graph and events, as the key to where Twitter has resonance and can differentiate. But my suggestions were vague, simply identifying areas to target.

Today I want to offer two concrete, but relatively simple products (or product features) they could introduce that would pull me back.

To leverage their knowledge of my interest graph, they should introduce Twitter Magazine. Magazine would scan my timeline, looking for links to long form content and videos, and skipping tweets with no URL links to long form content and removing tweets with links to products, e.g. Amazon links. Prioritize content with hashtags I tweet a lot, or followers and brands I interact with a lot. Take the resulting set of links and give it Medium-like formatting. Voila. An instant Flipboard like experience of personalized, targeted, high quality content (and, a place advertisers will want to be).

To leverage their strength in events, they should introduce Twitter Now. Now is a little more complicated to build, but here’s the essence. Identify that I am engaged in an event (say, I’m tweeting about the Game of Thrones premier). When I hit the Now button, Twitter dynamically pivots so that my entire experience is centered around that event. As if I am actually only following those people who are involved or tweeting about the event. Give priority to people with standing in the event (say, if one of the actors or the official Game of Thrones twitter account is tweeting). If the event is a big one, like an NFL game, that will produce a certain kind of experience. Now imagine you are a concert, and your network suddenly becomes the people at that concert. Or a technical conference and your network becomes the people at the conference. It could become a totally dynamic, interest-based, moment-based social network. This kind of experience can’t easily be replicated by a Facebook or Instagram, with a static social graph. More broadly, Twitter should embrace the notion of a dynamic social graph, based on shared interests, rather than (or in addition to) a static, person-to-person graph.

Just a couple of ideas. And I think these could be prototyped by an energetic Twitter employee fairly quickly to see if they resonate.