As Jack Dorsey returns to lead product at Twitter, here’s what he needs to fix

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, is back at the microblogging company as Executive Chairman leading product – a move that he revealed (how else?) in a tweet.

It’s fair to say that Dorsey will probably be pretty hands-off when it comes to Twitter, seeing as he’s still CEO of mobile payment startup Square but as he’s leading product, what needs fixing? Here, Jack, is your list courtesy of The Next Web team:

• Ditch the Dickbar: The ‘Quickbar’ (nicknamed the Dickbar after Twitter CEO Dick Costolo) in Twitter for iPhone is a useful way for Twitter to push lucrative Promoted Trends into users’ line of sight, but it’s unpopular with users. While that’s important for Twitter’s future, annoying users is simply out of of the question.
• Make #NewTwitter faster: If you’ve got a modern, fast machine and browser, the newly designed Twitter interface runs well, but slow and old machines suffer badly from the site barely loading at all under the strain of all that code it takes to make it look so god and work so well. Refining this is essential before ‘Old Twitter’ gets switched off for good.
• We want Pro accounts: While monetisation is all well and good, a paid-for Pro account that gets rid of any advertising that Twitter may be planning, offers advanced search tools (maybe even a return of the much-missed ‘track’ facility that gave the ability to ‘follow’ search terms in the same way you follow users) and expanded hourly usage limits, all wrapped into a package that was supported by all first-party and major third-party clients, would be snapped up by Twitter’s heaviest users.
• Smarter DMs: While Twitter probably won’t want to expand the character count for DMs (it would just turn into email), better handling of DMs with way to sort the inbox by sender and search the contents of DMs would be fantastic. It could even be part of a paid-for Pro account.
• Where’s our expanded metadata already?: At last year’s Chirp developer conference, Twitter revealed that it would allow developers to attach all sorts of metadata to tweets in a feature called Annotated Tweets. Perhaps you might want to attach MIDI data to play a simple tune right from a tweet, maybe business card data could be embedded – the possibility and scope of the project was amazing and yet we’ve not heard anything about a solid launch data almost a year on.

So, they’re our suggestions for product-related issues that Dorsey can address at Twitter. If you have any of your own, leave a comment below.