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How Twitter Can Reduce User Headaches
2009 September 19
Twitter Fail Whale
Twitter are looking to improve the user experience by changing how retweets work and while I applaud them for attempting to improve their service, I have two things that I’d like to see changed to improve things.
1. Add pagination to the list of people you’re following.
I’m currently following about 1250 people and today I wanted to go through the list and clean out some of the folks that I’ve lost interest in or simply never should have followed in the first place.
As there is no pagination on the ” people you’re following” page, I would have to push the “next” button 62 times to get to the first people that I ever followed. That makes cleaning out the list just a little too much work for my liking.
As a side note, you used to be able to go back through the pages rapidly by manipulating the URL but with Twitters recent changes that is no longer possible.
2. Add a time limit before you can unfollow someone.
People who follow you and immediately unfollow you as soon as you follow them back drive me mental. It’s one of the most annoying forms of twitter spam sued by unscrupulous marketers and self promoters attempt to build an “audience” (I use the term audience likely, as I believe that doing this may get you “followers” but there is little chance of them being an actual audience).
Adding a follower should be a two step process which includes a confirmation click.
In order to follow me you would click the follow button on my profile, then it would ask you “are you sure you want to follow PaulOFlaherty?”.
Once you’ve clicked the confirmation you are then doomed to follow that person for a minimum of 30 days.
That would reduce marketing spam dramatically as it would be more time consuming to add massive amounts of followers manually (I know there are automatic services, but we’ll address them in another post) and will make people a hell of a lot more selective about who they follow in the first place.
They’re my to ideas for improving Twitter. What would you like to see changed on Twitter to improve the user experience?
5 Responses
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RT @pauloflaherty How Twitter Can Reduce User Headaches – http://scrw.us/220
RT @pauloflaherty: How Twitter Can Reduce User Headaches – http://scrw.us/220
pagination is a good idea but some sort of filter would be great as well. Organise people by alphabet, number of twitts/followers/folowees/folower-folowee ratio…..
as far as second point is concerned it's not a problem for me. I don't get that many followers each day so checking out each new one isn't that time consuming. Obvious spammers are blocked right away. And with 40 accounts I follow that's about the limit for me and don't really intent to follow anymore. Of course if somebody interesting comes along I'll follow but otherwise no.And if spammers follow me and I don't spot them right away so be it. I don't use auto-follow so not a problem and there aren't that many to disrupt my ratio and make me stand out as some sort of weird account.
RT @pauloflaherty How Twitter Can Reduce User Headaches | Paul O’Flaherty http://bit.ly/Vnv6Q
I see where you're coming from, but it's a vicious cycle as you gain followers you gain more spam followers and also get exposed to more people that you may want to follow
And for those of us with more followers some of these changes would make things better 