alex.mullr.net/blog

I’m not too sure where I stand on how Twitter is evolving and growing at the moment. Guess if I was forced to opine, it would be that they’re not developing, improving or evolving fast enough. I know they’re trying to keep the service simple, but the lack of a few would-be-amazing features (groups, anyone?) makes it seem stale and unloved.

This was prompted by me thinking up ways that they could make the site more useful, primarily in terms of adding more user-generated information while still keeping the original, simple tweet structure. How about a community wiki-esque (oooh, but limited to 140 characters - I just thought of that) system for explaining what the hashtags actually mean. I searched for #pop this morning (it’s a course I’m doing) and it came up with a whole load of results about burgers. I’d love to have been able to hover over #pop in the tweet and see a 140 character explanation of what this place was.

Spam’s an issue, clearly, which is why the system would be community moderated. Once a site has the giant user base that Twitter does, I reckon they could leave a lot up to the users.

Finally, a really, really basic screenshot of the kind of thing I’m thinking about: