Twitter is a really cool service that asks the simple question “What are you doing?” All you have to do is type in what you are doing in less than 140 characters and it updates your timeline. It is a really cool tool to track what you or your friends have done over the past week, and it is convenient because you can log in to Twitter to update or you can just text or IM your update. There is also an awesome desktop tool called Twitterrific that allows you to update and track friends’ updates on the desktop, and it uses Growl so you can customize the non-invasive notifications whenever your friends update their Twitter..
This being said, Twitter has a fairly lackluster arsenal of other tools. Privacy settings for the service are somewhat lacking, the update service for AIM has been “under maintenance” for a few months, with no progress updates, and the available customizations for your Twitter homepage consist of basic HTML tweaks of border colors and background images. Finally, though, Twitter has launched a People Search tool that allows you to search for people via their names and then “follow” them by simply clicking within the search results. An example search for “Cafourek” turns up only my Twitter account (I am alone on the interwebs!). This is a much needed function that will be welcomed with open arms by the user community. In fact the email announcing the feature just went out to users after 8:00 pm (CST) this evening and already there are hundreds of posts springing up around the internet about this new feature. To access it, simply go to the Twitter homepage and enter a query in the bar that says “Find folks!”
While this is a step in the right direction, Twitter will definitely need to step up their efforts to improve their ‘bag of tricks.’ I would suggest starting with their visually unappealing profile/blog badges, meant to display your updates on your site. The badges available to display your updates along with your friends’ updates are pretty spiffy, but the individual badges are monochromatic text boxes with shiny borders…not very visually stimulating. Also, look for improved search functionality, better management of your followers, revamped privacy settings, and more high-quality embeddable features.
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