Even though I’m a Twitter aficionado, one of my criticisms has been the company’s lack innovation beyond the basic foundation.
Twitter has clearly been focusing on make its infrastructure rock-hard so the dreaded whale doesn’t appear on a regular or semi-regular basis. But this focus has distracted Twitter from from the creation of new, interesting and valuable features/wrinkles, opening the door for an army of third-party developers to step into the fray.
As a result, it’s encouraging to see Twitter improve its search functionality. When you do a search on Twitter.com, your results will appear on the same page rather than taking you a new page. It’s a small but positive step in the right direction in terms of making Twitter more user-friendly and intuitive.
Below, you’ll see a sketch of the new Twitter search look and feel. As you can see, the search results will be front and centre. In many respects, Twitter needs to do a lot more work to improve the functionality and usability of Twitter.com given the growing popularity of rivals such as Tweetdeck, Twhirl, Splitweet and CoTweet. If more people are using third-party services where Twitter has no presence (other than providing the API), then it reduces Twitter’s ability to monetize its userbase.
Technorati Tags: search, twitter, tweetdeck, twhirl
2 Comments
I just don't see it as innovation. I have the exact opposite opinion. I don't think twitter has bothered to innovate at all. Their inclusion of search was via acquisition. Even the "enhancements" to search are basic at best. My take here http://www.thekmiecs.com/marketing-advertising/wh…
I would LOVE to see commonalities when visiting someone's profile… like common people we both follow or common people who follow me and the person whose profile I'm viewing. Sort of like friends in common on Facebook. It would help people expand their circles without necessarily seeing the common tweets.
http://twitter.com/seeking_balance