Twitter may be popular– but it hasn’t done anything new for a while.

 

News surrounding Twitter and its purpose usually comes in the form of outing super injuncters or celebrity rows. 

 

Twitter began in 2006 and took a while for popularity to build but once it did – bam, everyone had an account, it was a great source of up to the minute news and gave the ‘man on the street’ intimate access to celebrities.

 

Its popularity was clear to see when there were important worldwide events, such as the 2010 FIFA World Cup, when fans wrote 2,940 tweets per second, and when Michael Jackson passed away when servers crashed after users were updating their status.

 

There was a trickle of something innovative when it added locations to Tweets, and rolled out the revamped Twitter then the innovation seemed to stop.

Although, it could be argued that it stopped for PC users as, together with the developer Atebits, it produced Tweetie (now renamed Twitter) for the Mac and iPhone. 

 

It was up to other developers to give PC and Mac users the opportunity to search Tweets, to integrate across platforms and to react quicker than Twitter’s web browser could. 

 

So what did Twitter do about that? Not a lot really, until recently – it acquired TweetDeck, one of the most third-party Twitter clients. Tweetdeck rose in popularity because of its cross-platform capabilities and it is likely that Twitter acquired the platform to ensure it had greater presence than other third-party apps .

To make the Twitter brand more effective and to keep people using the official site and apps Twitter does need to step up its innovation.

 

Here are a few ways it could improve:

 

Make it easier to ‘list’ people: whether entertainers or news sites, users won’t have to read hundreds of posts to get to ones that matter to them.

Share via other sites: Most sites have a link to share on Twitter – why not the other way round?

 

Location search: this can be added by users but there could be an automatic search when users move to place/event.

 

Improve discussions: if someone I follow has replied to something interesting I want to see the whole conversation, maybe even reply in regards to this – without the original users being confused about what I am talking about.

 

Stop going offline so much!

 

What are your thoughts on Twitter – how would you improve it?