Misconceptions about Twitter features: It’s not built in, it’s tacked on

I ran across a post by Macteens Editor in Chief Daniel Hollister that explains, quite well, what killer functionality Twitter is missing. He’s right in in a lot of ways - Twitter is very bare bones and it doesn’t provide even the kind of functionality you find in other microblogging services like Pownce.

Twitter relies on its API and its users to develop features that are lacking. Hollister identifies the following gaps in Twitter’s feature set. Here’s how you can make them up with third party solutions (or, in one case, clever use of built in features):

1. Clutter

Hollister find the home page too cluttered, and the 20-tweet per page limit annoying. If you fail to check back quickly enough, you’re going to miss things.

I use the twitter desktop client Twitterific about 70% of the time. I use my iPhone about 15% of the time. I use the home page about 5% of the time.

Twitterific saves tweets on my desktop as it checks for them, which means I can scroll through a few hours worth of updates at a time without paging through.

2. Breadth or depth, but not both

Here he’s more right than with others. You can follow tons of people and get too many tweets, or you can follow very few people and miss a lot of the action.

I like to use mobile notifications to separate out those tweeters who I feel are particularly important. I can follow as many people as I like while selectively choosing whose tweets get pushed to my phone.

3. Archiving sucks

The web page does provide some pretty lame archiving features. You can jump through pages of 20 as far back as you want, but that’s about it.

The good news is that you CAN search twitter for past tweets. I like to use either Tweetscan or a Google search targeted at twitter.com (yep, tweets are indexed).

4. Nobody wants to use it & It doesn’t do anything

I know a lot of people who share this view of Twitter. I myself didn’t get it when I first started using it.

But the first part is just wrong (plenty of people want to use twitter, myself included) and the claim that it doesn’t do anything doesn’t really resonate with me. Nothing on the computer is really “doing” anything, if you look at it the right way.

Hollister says that if you remove all the features from Facebook except for the RSS feed and status updates, you have twitter. I’d say you’re still doing something.

One thing that I am 100% behind Hollister on though is this: Twitter is not a social network. Many people are starting to refer to it as a social network. I think that as a whole we (the blogosphere) have a tendency to play fast and loose with our terminology, and it ends up hurting us in the end.

Twitter, in my mind, is a social utility. One component of the growing feature set of the social web.

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