2 suggestions to make Twitter infinitely better

Hello, my name is Chris Sacca. Welcome to my notes on how to fix Twitter.

No, only kidding. My shirts are not nearly as cool and my bank balance is not nearly as large. But hey, here’s some ‘fixes’ I think Twitter should work on. Jack, you can have them for free with this added piece of advice – stick around to implement them.

I only have two points to add/compliment Sacca’s extensive essay on the service from earlier this year:

1. Add metadata

One of the biggest issues with Twitter is finding new interesting people to follow – the service’s own recommendations outside of the experimental @MagicRecs account are dodgy in the extreme. There’s also an issue with efficiently filtering out tweets you’re not interested in.

Answer? Metadata.

Twitter should allow users to tag tweets with ‘invisible hashtags’, say limited to two or three with a list of pre-approved topics. That way you’d be able to easily define in setting that you do or don’t want to see ‘politics’ or ‘music’ tweets.

Of course, not everyone would use the feature but many would and it’d easily allow you to curate your feed and still follow Twitterers who are good on one topic but tedious on others.

2. Become an IoT backbone that IFTTT and Facebook will quake at

This is non-trivial for Twitter’s developers but would be incredible for users. I’m proposing a new class of Twitter account for – machine users.

These accounts will be reserved for bots and Internet of Things (IoT) integrations. They’d only be allowed to tweet ‘ordinary’ accounts if explicitly given authorization. Otherwise they’d be designed to hook up with other machine accounts.

Their messages would be invisible in the general stream and only show up in a new dedicated column for users who opt in to their messages.

This would allow, for instance, your Nest to tweet your Nest Cam or your TV to alert you of new Netflix options. Imagine app update alerts delivered instantly through the machine tweet feed.

Of course, devs would be able to create their own machine accounts and potentially even sell access to useful feeds through a Twitter managed store, using Apple’s 70/30 model.

Oh, also: Just sell to Google and become a wholly-owned subsidiary.

Those are my two…well, three suggestions. Give us yours in the comments.

Feature image by Napier Lopez.