In case you hadn’t known this before, @ reply’s weren’t a feature on Twitter originally.  It was something user’s had started to do to help give context to their tweets.  That was a very important evolutionary step for Twitter, because Twitter as the “communications” tool wouldn’t exist as it does today without the ability for people to carry out even rudimentary conversations on the service.

Unfortunately we haven’t seen any innovation come from Twitter on the user-facing side for a long time now. Twitter’s recommended users feature is a complete failure, and we’ve even gone backwards where before the Track was enabled and users could easily “listen” to the twitter stream for specific terms.  At the same time, my favourite open source competitor Laconica has been innovating.  Laconica is dominating Twitter by providing valuable features to help users. It already supports Open ID and Groups, and built in events are soon to come.

Evolve the Language

What I want to talk about is my original point about the evolution of the @ reply.  Since then one of the newer user innovation on Twitter which is starting to catch on is the # or hash-tag, using this lets users follow dialogue around a topic whenever users include a specific tag in their messages, such as “#openmode”.  Meanwhile, Laconica with its support for groups has also created the ! tag, noting messages that get sent to members of a particular group, such as “!ubuntu rocks” , or “Can anyone recommend a !socialmedia expert in !toronto?” which would get sent to members of either the !socialmedia or !toronto groups.

If there’s one change we need to see in Twitter in the near future is more innovation on the different ways we can communicate and organize through our messages.

Here is an overview and my recommendations on new tags to create or that already exist elsewhere and that need to be integrated into Twitter:

What Exists

! Groups

Receive messages from groups that you subscribe to.  Examples of groups I’m subscribed to on Identi.ca include: !crunchbang, !python, !ubuntu, !linux, !twhirl, and !skype.

# Description tags

If you went to my profile page on Identi.ca you’d see that I use various # tags to describe myself.  This helps not only my friends and followers understand me better, but is very important for searches performed on the site.  People can find me by searching “toronto ryerson linux” (or they would be able to if it wasn’t broken on Identi.ca).

Possibilities

♻ Re-tweeting

I saw Evan Prodromou use this on Identi.ca and find it a very elegant evolution of re-tweeting.  The recycling symbol represents well the nature behind re-tweeting someone, and since the majority of the time re-tweeting is not done by hand but instead by using a function in your Twitter client, you don’t actually enter the special character code (twitter it self could convert RT’s to this symbol automatically though if it wanted.

It would look really elegant if re-tweeting simply became:

“♻AccordionGuy Jon Stewart takes apart Bill O’Reilly’s double-standard on rights to privacy. Namely, if you’re a liberal, you have none: http://is.gd/j6Vb”

$ Events

So many tweet-ups and larger events are now being organized over Twitter that a built in system for handling them is badly needed. A $ event tag when invoked for the first time could automatically create a new Twitter Events page similar to what TwtVite has done.

You could tweet a message like this: “$highSchoolDance Feb24 [or “next tuesday”] 8pm-11pm” and what your followers would see might be a message like “@malcolmbastien created $highSchoolDance Feb 24 8pm-11pm”

And of course people would be able to just as easily RSVP for the event using the same event ID: “$highSchoolDance ?yes [$no, $maybe]”

% Quizes

Twitter is the perfect platform to get questions answered. Having a dedicated tag to help people ask questions,and to let people respond in a structured way would do a big part to increase our ability to use the wisdom of the crowd / the swarm intelligence of twitter.  % Quizes would also auto-generate their own Twitter Quiz page.

Ask a question: “%ttt Would you attend Third Tuesday at Supermarket?”

Let people respond: “%ttt ?yes [$no, $maybe]”

More possibilities

Even if all of these tools were implemented there are still a few tags left for innovation: “^”, “&”, and “*”.  “^” is currently used by VenTwits, but I can’t really figure out the point of it yet.  Either way, if Twitter wants to continue to be a great communications platform, we as its users, need the tools to communicated our ideas, and to engage with each other in more ways.

What features would you like to see implemented into Twitter?
What new ideas can you think of?
Are you beginning to feel limited in the way you communicate on Twitter?

Related articles by Zemanta

• New Twhirl 0.9 public release is here (loiclemeur.com)