Remember the Mikeyy virus? That was an exciting couple of weekends, but it didn’t actually do much harm. The thing is, viruses tend to get worse, not better, and one of these days something nasty is going to hit Twitter… hard.

Let’s say this new virus doesn’t post cheeky messages – instead, it deletes tweets. It deletes your tweets. All of them. One day your timeline is there, the next, it’s gone. Your account was registered two years ago, and you have a vague recollection of doing over 10,000 updates, but for everybody who looks at your Twitter profile post-virus, you’ve done and said nothing.

Or what if Twitter has a really bad day and accidentally erases a whole bunch of accounts? Thousands and thousands of them, one of which is yours?

I touched upon this a little in my article about tweet ownership, but the reality now is that if something happens on Twitter that results in your account getting wiped – and this includes Twitter closing your account for a TOS breach – you’re stuffed. Even if you’re backing up your tweets using one of the very crude external options available, and saving them to an Excel spreadsheet or whatever, there’s absolutely no way to get those tweets back on to Twitter. Restoration is kind of the point of a backup.

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Twitter’s direct message (DM) system is, quite frankly, rubbish. An inbuilt messenger is a handy and convenient feature on any social network, but what we have on Twitter is so basic and limiting to be almost useless. Here are six ways in which it could easily be improved.

1. Direct Messages MUST Be Two-Way

As it stands, the direct message system on Twitter isn’t really fair – if I follow somebody this affords them the right to send me a direct message, which many do, certainly if they want to keep something private. However, unless they follow me back, I do not have the same luxury. I cannot reply to their DM. This is ridiculous for two reasons: one, it gives them an immediate advantage, and two, the only way for me to respond to their ‘private’ message is to make it public with an @reply.

I say: you should only be able to send a direct message to another user if you’re both following each other. Otherwise, you have to send a reply. This would encourage mutual following and cut down on unnecessary and one-way direct messaging. No mutual follow, no direct message. You’ll have to send me a reply instead.

2. Mass Marking/Deletion Of Direct Messages

Twitter needs to add a series of checkboxes next to each delete message so that you can quickly mark and delete any you want to remove and/or move somewhere else en masse (see ‘Folders’, below). There also needs to be a one-click ‘select/unselect all’ – as it is, I can remove all my direct messages using a service like DM Whacker, but that should be a basic feature on Twitter, surely?

3. Search

If you’re on Twitter long enough, pretty soon you’ll build up a lot of direct messages. Some of these will contain useful links and information – I stress the word some, as relatively it’s going to be very few. Right now, the only way to find that data is to scroll back through page after page of direct message, and hoping that CTRL+F and the right keyword will find what you want. A search feature built in to the DM system would make this a very simple process.

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Consider this, if you will: I decide to write a book through Twitter, 140 characters at a time. Moroever, I do this stream-of-consciousness style, and just let it all flow out. I keep no backup. I write my book, tweet after tweet after tweet. Soon, thousands and thousands of my words are in the system.

For their own reasons, Twitter decides I’ve done something wrong, and suspends my account. All my work is lost.

What are my legal rights? Who owns those tweets? Can I get them back?

In Twitter’s terms of service, under a section called, “Copyright (What’s Yours is Yours)”, they state:

We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.

We encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms.

That’s fine, but under “General Conditions”, they also say:

We reserve the right, in accordance with any applicable laws, to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time.

We’ve seen this happen before with accounts such as the fake Christopher Walken. The reasons for the suspension of that user were fairly clear, but what about all those tweets that he wrote? They’ve also been removed without a trace. The account had a loyal and amused following, and those tweets were funny and had value.

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I was active on Twitter last night when the news of Michael Jackson’s cardiac arrest broke on TMZ. When the same website reported that he had died about an hour later, the impact on the internet was dramatic. This situation was then furthered by the world looking to confirm TMZ’s report – when CNN and the BBC (finally) legitimised the news, the internet almost stopped.

• The Los Angeles Times was one of the first major publications to state that Jackson was dead. When CNN mentioned this as a source, the LA Times website was brought down by the traffic influx, receiving over 2.3 million page views in one hour.
• Twitter went into a 5-6 minute delay. I saw the fail whale for the first time in weeks. TweetVolume reported that more than 65,000 tweets reported on the original TMZ story within the first hour – around 5,000 per minute at peak. “We saw an instant doubling of tweets per second the moment the story broke,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the Los Angeles Times. “This particular news about the passing of such a global icon is the biggest jump in tweets per second since the U.S. presidential election.” Ultimately, updates about Jackson would double Twitter’s update frequency, and the singer currently occupies seven of Twitter’s ten top trending topics.
• The number of status updates on Facebook was triple the average. Despite this, Facebook remained operable throughout.
• America Online’s AIM instant messenger product – which was undergoing some minor scheduled maintenance around the time of the Jackson news – was severely impacted by the story and went down for 40 minutes. “Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth,” an AOL spokesperson said.
• An edit war on Jackson’s page on Wikipedia ultimately forced the online encyclopaedia to freeze.

Traffic to all the leading online news websites in North America was 20% above the average.

Earlier the same day, Farrah Fawcett also died. After Jackson’s death was confirmed, false reports of the passing of Jeff Goldblum and Harrison Ford put more pressure on global web servers.

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Yesterday, my article about the measurable benefits of Twitter’s suggested user list (SUL) attracted quite a lot of attention, both within this blog and around the internet. This was furthered by some interesting comments from those I mentioned in my piece.

The thing is – it’s very easy to rag all over something as obviously bunk as Twitter’s SUL, without actually suggesting an alternative. Hence, and in the interests of balance, here are three ways I think that the suggested user list could be significantly improved.

Personalise

Twitter could radically improve the value of the SUL by personalising it to the new user. This would be best accomplished by asking questions about interests, hobbies, sport and club affiliations, employment, etc, during set-up, to build a richer profile in order to best match recommendations. The very basic 160-character ‘bio’ that we have now is pretty useless.

Twitter would scan your data, and recommend 20-50 users for the new user to follow to get started. This would not be pre-selected in any way. If you didn’t like the list, maybe you could click the button and Twitter would roll the dice again.

These more in-depth profiles would remain private and would only be analysed when looking for follower recommendations.

Optimise

Twitter could continue to use a pre-selected list of a few hundred suggested users, but instead of just giving you a random selection of these when you sign up, Twitter would tailor the list to your interests. This could be accomplished through the use of a richer profile set-up (as above), or by simply asking a few questions each time you require more suggested users to follow.

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