What Twitter needs now.

“Again with Twitter?!”
Yeah I know… Twitter is here, get used to it.

Alright, so what does Twitter need? First one who says “a business model” gets a cookie. Yes, they do need that, but let me take a detour through the user side of things for a moment and I’ll get back to that in a minute.

As I have said before, Twitter’s simplicity is its strength. I don’t think they should give it up for anything. Others have tried to “enhance” the user experience by adding threading and things like that. An interesting idea on paper, but it does take away some of the product’s usability. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a hater; let’s just say it’s different and the crowds seem to be gravitating towards more simplicity.
So Twitter has to stay simple, but there is still room to expand. And I think topical conversations is indeed something that could enhance the user experience tremendously. If done right, and in the spirit of the product.
In comes the #hashtag. We all know that you can use these to specify what topic you are talking about. This is incredibly useful and I strongly believe Twitter should make it its next big push. So to put things clearly:

@notpatrick thinks @twitter should embrace #hashtags and make them the second arm of the community.

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February 9th, 2009 | 8 Comments