Somewhere inside Twitter there is a secret document listing the major features users want to see in an improved Twitter, and all of these are in it:

Built-in retweet function

The retweet, or RT, is one of the major weaknesses of Twitter. It is used both as a courtesy, to say thanks for an interesting comment or link, and as a metric for Twitter popularity or influence. Unfortunately, the lack of a built-in RT function, one that creates an uneditable tweet and guarantees the integrity of the “audit trail,” opens RTs to confusion, misuse and abuse. By adding a formalized RT function, Twitter could add Digg-like functionality, make RTs easier to format and publish, and more consistently trackable as a measure of influence.

IP tracking of users

By logging the IP addresses of all Twitter users during the sign-up process, and blocking the IP addresses of abusers, Twitter could make some serious progress at trapping more spammers before they annoy users. I know you don’t have to follow them back, but who needs them cluttering up our followers lists and hogging bandwidth? And some of them are using pornographic images and links to offensive sites most of us don’t care to know about.

Extended tweet content capabilities

Add-ons like Power Twitter, and tools like FriendFeed, Presently and Yammer, have numerous extended content capabilities like the ability to add a “More” button to an update in excess of 140 characters, and a way to attach images to an update. The purists will scream that this is a “slippery slope” that erodes the simple appeal of Twitter, but the majority of users will be overjoyed to be able to do these kinds of things.

Multiple account certification levels

It looks like Twitter is already headed down this path, but it would be nice to give everyone who wants it, even individual users, the ability to certify on some level. By making it easier to know who a user is “talking” to, Twitter would improve everyone’s (except spammers’) experience, and make the service more viable as a serious communications tool for businesses of every kind and size.

Advanced profiles and profile search

With a little lightweight structure in its profiles, Twitter could make some big improvements in usability. While Facebook takes this to extremes, it holds some examples of how this would work. By structuring geographic location in user profiles, for example, it would be easier to find and network with people near you. This information is also used by third-party ranking sites like Twitterholic, and since there is no integrity to how the information is entered and indexed on Twitter, the rankings on these sites become less useful. Twitter’s advanced search capability goes a long way to solving this problem, but it searches tweets, not profiles.

Groups and structured hashtagging

These two features are closely related. Twitter is quite useful as a medium for online discussion forums. Some of these are in relation to a particular live conference or event, and others, like #carchat and #journchat, exist entirely on Twitter. Currently, these are managed with hashtags, those “codes” in each tweet with a hash mark in front of them enabling users to use tools like Twitter search and Hashtags.org to track conversations in realtime. This has many negative repercussions. There is often confusion as to the proper tag for an event. There are only so many tags in the world. (Think about how many hashtags incorporate “Web 2.0” for example.) Inclusion of the tag takes up precious 140-character real estate. And people who are not involved in the chat have to watch it stream by on their timelines.

The solution to this is structured tagging and/or groups. With built-in tagging, and the ability to opt in or opt out to one or more tags, users could engage in Twitter chats or comment on events in realtime more elegantly and with more satisfying results. (Take a look at how Splittweet or TweetDeck handles these things.) Alternately, with a group function, users could join groups such as journchat, and could then watch only updates from that group and update only to that group. This would reduce clutter for everyone and eliminate the complexity and confusion of hashtagging.

The end of the Twitter DIY era

Oops. That was six features, not five. But everyone has their ideas of how to make Twitter better.

The Twitter ecosystem is one of the many things that make Twitter so powerful. And some of Twitter’s current capabilities, like search (formerly Summize), came from third party apps and sites. But is this a sustainable business model? How hard would some of these features be for Twitter to develop internally?

Scott McNealy often said that an engineer is someone who prefers to buy a bicycle unassembled so they can stay up all night building it. As Twitter tries to get to 25 million, and then 50 million users, the company will run out of do-it-yourselfers, and will stall, unless the environment becomes a little more friendly and usable. Say what you will about Facebook, integration and ease-of-use are a big part of why it has passed the 200 million mark and isn’t looking back.

Tags: Twitter, Yammer, Presently, TweetDeck, SplitTweet, Summize, profile search, spammers, IP addresses, hashtags, groups, certification, more button