Twitter Feature Requests—What’s YOURS?

I’ve been a long-time advocate and user of Twitter. I think that they are onto something really big, and I’m not the only one.

That said, I have become frustrated with Twitter lately. Not because of their ongoing uptime problems, but rather the way that the company has allowed those problems to dominate the conversation. It is the company’s responsibility to control their brand image, and by reacting to the negativity they are establishing a tone of appeasement instead of keeping a forward-leaning posture and focusing on building the brand.

In any event, I thought that we could give the guys at Twitter something else to focus on….so here are the twitter features I want to see (note: not all of these are original ideas by me, but some are), along with a poll so that you can chime in too:

1. Turn Twitter.com Homepage into Search Engine of Twits: Twitter has developed a massive content library. There is no reason I should have to go over to TweetScan to search that library. In fact, I think if Twitter was smart they’d buy TweetScan (cheaply) just to show their API-development community that there can be rewards for building the stuff that makes Twitter better.

2. Add a “Poll your followers” function: I’d like to be able to send a message like this “POLL: Which phone is best? 1) iphone 2) blackberry bold 3) tin-can-and-string” Followers could respond with “@andyswan 1″ and twitter could send me the consolidated results once a certain amount of time had passed or a certain # of responses achieved.

3. Tag the people that you follow: If I can tag people, then I can turn on/off their updates to my mobile by tag. For example, on Saturdays I might turn off mobile updates from people tagged “stocks”, but turn on mobile updates from people tagged “Louisville”.

4. Ignore when someone twits @someoneelse: Just because I like reading someone’s thoughts on technology does not mean that I want to read his two-way conversation about where to meetup for beers later.  I’d love the option to ignore posts that are directed at someone else.

5. Post tagging: This one could be big. If I could put %Tag Stocks, AAPL% prior to my twit, then you could follow me but decide that you only want to receive updates from me (or everyone) that have specific tags. Unlimited applications for this.

Which would you like to see? You can also add your own in the poll and comment below….

I’m sure there are TONS of more features that we can think of, and I’m sure the team at twitter is already working on several new feature sets. But I think it’s about time that everyone stopped jumping on the “bitch about twitter downtime” bandwagon. I mean geez this is a parabolic startup and we’re the early adopters—let’s act like it!