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Wow, so Twitter is a success but it needs to be completely rethought?

I know, I’m far from being the first person to criticize Twitter on a blog. However, I want to discuss an angle and offer a potential solution for reinventing Twitter into a tool which can be useful, monetized and ultimately, meet the needs of the people who use it every day.

The chat client that wasn’t

To begin, I will revisit the original intent behind Twitter, as stated time and time again by its founders.

Twitter, as a web site and service, was created to allow people to answer (and share their answer) to a very simple question: What are you doing? It was meant to be an evolution of the “status update” that instant messaging clients or social networking giants Facebook and MySpace popularized. It wasn’t, however, designed to BE an instant messaging or chat client. That is how Twitter has devolved (note: not “evolved”).

Now, I’m not saying that a chat client is a bad thing. Chat is actually a very good thing – I use chat all the time. Some of the best chat clients let me talk to people, on a real-time basis, organize my friends into lists and keep records of those conversations in a threaded view for review later.

Does Twitter do that?

The answer is kind of, but it needs a lot of help. Third party applications like Tweetdeck, or Tweetie attempt to organize a mess of followers into a pseudo list of contacts. Services like Twitter Search (formerly Summize) attempt to give you the ability to scan conversations for keywords. There are even bot applications that will answer tweets for you, greet new followers or send direct messages. But even with a thriving third party developer community and APIs, Twitter is a feeble chat client.

Try as they might, Twitter the “company” has failed to remedy the problem. They put limits on the number of followers one could have, and when the service gets overloaded (as recently as Michael Jackson’s passing just a few days ago) features on site get turned off so that the entire service doesn’t come crashing down.

Problems and solutions

Here is the biggest problem though in my opinion. I follow roughly 220 people, but 99.9% of them aren’t talking about something I care about when I read my Twitter feed. These folks may have said something at one point in time that interested me, which is why I started following them. However, as I sit here today, writing this post, I can tab over to my Tweetie window and find not a single conversation that I’m interested enough to engage in. Not even one.

First and foremost, I think Twitter the “company” should shoot for making Twitter the “web site” into a chat portal. Now wait a minute, I just wrote 400 words describing why Twitter is a sucky chat client. That’s right — well, the reason is because it wasn’t created to be a chat client. But that’s how people use it, so it may as well move in that direction. Besides, how many monetization models are there for a status update site – none that I can think of.

People love to chat on Twitter, but as I pointed out, at any given time you may (but probably won’t) find people talking about something you care about. That’s why Twitter needs to move towards being more topic focused and less “follower” focused.

At the end of the day, does it really matter who has the most followers? Does it matter that I follow 220 people but almost never read what they have to say? Does it matter 923 people follow me, and do the people on the other end of MY tweets care about what I write? People care when its a topic of interest to them, and that’s where Twitter could potentially shine (and make some money).

It’s about the conversations stupid

Make Twitter about conversations and build on the things that Twitter does so well – mobile, extensibility and ease of use. Eliminate the follower/followed model and instead, create spaces for chatting on specific topics. Twitter search and trending topics are a great first step. Look at the Iran Election – hundreds of thousands of people all talking about a specific topic. Me? I didn’t care so much, so let me opt out of those messages – instead of flooding my feed with hundreds of messages on a subject I don’t want to read (my only option was to shut off Twitter or unfollow, which I did).

How about a system where you sign in, and opt yourself in to topics. Perhaps utilizing the existing Twitter framework you could specify keywords or create your own topic. From there on out, you will continue to receive on-topic tweets until you change your settings.

From a business standpoint, companies would be able to sponsor certain topics and invite people in to communicate. That’s really what businesses want anyway – people to opt in to messaging. Those companies would pay Twitter to have perhaps a permanent (or time limited), branded keyword topic on the site and Twitter would promote those conversations in much the same way they promote trending topics.

Regardless of how it might shake out, Twitter is going to need to embrace the chat model fully and modify their tools in order to make it a servicable application for talking online OR they need to fully embrace it being a status update system and get really creative about how they make money. Right now, Twitter is pretty much straddling both world’s and not doing an exceptional job at either.