The good doc is complaining, not about a missing ability to forward things to her buddy list, but about the missing ability to comment on and twist the meaning of the things she retweets.

I don’t have any problem doing that with Tweetdeck, so maybe the problem is the web interface rather than twitter itself.

There is also a perfectly fine way of attaching shortened URLS and twitpics to tweets (a twit isn’t a message. it’s a person).

I guess the answer to Doc Clouthier’s problems is to use Tweetdeck.

Cheers!
Beaglescout

But much of what you speak is valid, speaking from a long, long history (30 years and running) with computers.

A certain amount of structure is good. It keeps things comprehensible. But there is an ideal amount of randomness to things, too — you want to get to pay attention to the things you have elected as worth attention — but you should also get random inputs as well, in order to bump into new stuff. Ideally, that’s not all totally random, some of it should be “edited”, and that’s a missing component.

You probably want (my own numbers, yours will vary) 50-60% stuff you know, 25-35% stuff selected “editors” have sent you, and 5-15% stuff that’s completely random.

What’s probably missing in Twitter is the editor factor, though it is currently being partly filled by your friend/conversations with others (though it sounds as though the geniuses at twitter are actually removing an essential function). There should be some form of editor function, where things you tweet go specifically to people who “sign up” to receive them, with the idea that you specifically want to call attention to them so that others will share, as opposed to stuff you just randomly want to say (kind of a “significance” factor — most stuff may not be all that significant. other stuff is stuff you think has some profound element, or “need to know”, to it).

You may not want to get all the random conversations that other bloggers you know have to say, but they may have things they identify as “important” and those you might want to be part of a network to receive. Blogs kind of perform this function, I think, but we’re talking about a kind of more interactive social “do everything” kind of app.

This, by the way is what “Push” is really all about. They talked a lot about it 10 years ago but never really understood that “mass push” would never work. Push can only work on the networked individual level.

I think the problem with twitter is that, as a medium, it’s also too small (one of the key reasons I don’t twit). It needs to allow for larger things to be associated with it, if not “sent” with it. As far as I know, it doesn’t have that. It needs a companion network that’s usable for larger stuff, which could be nothing more than a merging of twitter with something that also pulls up associated URLs and/or emails when clicked — that being the chief thing, easy access to the “expanded” form.

As the above missive shows, that’s one reason I don’t twit — most of the stuff I want to say takes more than 100 characters or so.

P