's growth had plateaued. What could Twitter
do to reach the masses and end up with hundreds of millions of people using the service? Simplify, simplify, simplify. Right now it is so easy to get lost in the service when you are a new user. You first start out by not believing something worthwhile can be said in 140 characters. That is too brief. You may be do not desire to share with the world what you had for lunch. You might not know who to follow. The people you personally know are not necessarily the people with the most interesting tweets
. What's a tweet
anyway? 
has to evolve as a service. A stangnant basic service that is hoping to only scale will not cut it. Twitter
at once will have to become feature rich and simpler. The biggest bottleneck to Twitter
's growth has been how primitive the search function at the site is. I can't even get it to deliver to me tweets
I posted several months ago. And all those tweets
reside on Twitter
's servers.
necessarily has to grow and eat into its ecosystem. That is how Windows grew. New, exciting, independent software programs found themselves eaten up in the next version of Windows
. The Sun
engulfed the nearby planets and grew. Before they introduced the lists feature, Twitter
had become unmanageable for me. The retweet
feature I like, but I can see why it has generated much controversy. One big reason is the old way you could edit the tweet before retweeting it. To that I say, you can still choose to do it the old way. But I have to keep coming back to search. Bing and Google are not doing it. When I first went to Bing
's Twitter
page weeks ago, I saw the mistake they were making. They were basically using Twitter
to collect votes for the hottest news articles for that day. That is only one of many uses of Twitter. And I think Google News
does a much better job of bringing me the news for the day. And it is not true Google
is doing real time search now. Just because you display a few tweets on the topic I just conducted a search
on does not quite cut it.My Twitter
account has to be the starting point for my Twitter
experience. And one thing could add to that experience more than any other: the ability to search
all tweets that might have ever been posted. I should not have to use Delicio.us
. I should be able to store all links of interest to me right there on Twitter
, and I used to do that. Then Twitter
stopped delivering.Just like PageRank is not going to be enough for Google
, just like Google
is going to have to make sense of webpages in their own right to see how much value they have, Twitter
search is going to be able to read tweets, and make sense of a large number of tweets with the same keywords to give me a feel for what the masses are thinking and feeling. Right now I don't have that. Show me on one screen what the masses are saying in a million tweets. Where is that search and display function?But real time
is not just for now. Real time archives are also valuable. Tell me how Obama
supporters felt about Obama
in the summer of 2008
. Collect all the tweets on the topic and make sense of them all for me. Money
talks, and Twitter
does not have enough of it to truly get ambitious as a basic feature of the web experience. I still think Twitter
should go for an IPO
so it will have a billion dollars to become what email would be if it were designed today. Maybe it will not be Wave, it will be Twitter
. It still can be.
has had a scalability problem because it has not had 300 million dollars to pour into its infrastructure
. Twitter
has to be always on if it can be part of the basic infrastructure
of our web experience. 
If email
were invented today, it would not have a subject line. I would not need your email
address to be able to send you an email
. The email
would always be short. I should be able to read a million such emails in less than a minute. A celebrity should not feel overwhelmed by all the emails she gets because the search feature is so good. Because Twitter
makes sense of a million tweets on the same topic in as much time as Google takes to deliver search results. Well, Twitter
does not, not now.And Twitter
DM is a joke. You have so little control over it. I get so much spam
, I stopped reading DMs months ago. The Twitter
trending topics list is so feature poor, it is not even funny
. I should be able to do time travel
with that list. I should be able to do topics, and sub topics, and sub sub topics with that list. I should be able to have a trending topics list based only on my followers. The trending topics list needs to be a full blown creature
. 
today is not all it can be. If Twitter
is going to end up with a billion users, it is not going to be the Twitter that we know today. Twitter Should Go For A Netscape-Like IPO
Goal: A Billion People On Twitter
Google Wave For The Masses
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