Twitter, How Do You Frustrate Me? Let Me Count The Ways

I love Twitter and all that you can do with it but, gaaaaawwwd, could Twitter use some improvements.

I’m testing out all the Twitter management software–TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, and Mixero, primarily–but none of them really do what I need them to do. If Twitter would just add the features I need, I could avoid the tremendous amount of labor I’ll need to invest in whatever tool I settle upon to make Twitter work the way I need it to work.

In my perfect world, my new Twitter features would be:

• The ability to easily categorize followers into groups I define:
  • Family
  • Friends
  • Co-workers
  • Clients
  • Brands
  • Media
  • Social Media
  • PR
  • Politics
  • Football
    • Touch football buddies
  • Baseball
  • Who knows what else
• Let me follow the activity streams of just those groups
• The ability to Tweet to just an individual group or select groups
• Ad Hoc Groups: Let me search my followers for keywords used in their tweets for a given day, week, or month to identify followers by topical interests
• Threaded conversations, for the love of God
• Timed auto tweets from RSS feeds
• Analytics
  • Click through data:
    • For individual links, like bit.ly does
    • For aggregate clicks
      • What time of day gets the most clicks?
      • What source gets the most clicks?
      • Who are the most prolific clickers?
  • Network analysis
    • Identify influentials
    • Find frequent re-tweeters
    • Analyze followers by geography
    • Analyze keywords of followers’ bios & tweets
      • Allow me to create groups of them
    • Identify the most popular content within my network
    • Analyze my own behavior on Twitter
    • Identify the reach of my tweets based on re-tweeters network volume
• Real time keyword cloud of what my followers are saying and one for those I’m following, as well
• Better search
  • Allow me to create more sophisticated search queries to better separate the wheat from the chaff
  • Allow me to combine several searches into one stream
    • i.e. Combining the same search phrase with or without punctuation into the same stream

At the very least, the ability to categorize followers and direct tweets selectively to a given group would make me much more relevant to my followers by reducing the signal to noise ratio and would make Twitter a much more enjoyable experience for myself for the very same reason.

It would also make Twitter a much more powerful utility for everyone and would likely increase its overall use. I’d think the categorization data would be pretty valuable to Twitter, as well.

So, Twitter…please…give me some love!