Here is one of dozens of emails I get daily from twitter:
This drives me nuts! Here is what I (now) know about Doug Scott:
- He is the President of OgilvyEntertainment – which I assume is part of Ogilvy & Mathers
- He has a lot of followers and follows a lot of people
- He has said 59 things on twitter
- Someone I don’t really know (but follow) “follows” him
- Some other people I don’t know follow him
I get dozens of these a day. I have no idea if I should follow Doug Scott.
Why can’t twitter tell me the kind of stuff that Doug talks about? Will he tweet about the agency world? Emerging news? Who he’s having a latte with? I have very little context.
Twitter would win me over with two changes – one is simple, and one would be a major shift:
1. Show me the last 5 tweets and let me use this as an indicator: This would enable me to decide if his comments are interesting AND (hopefully) reduce the crap that Twitter trolls write so that I could avoid following “people” like AwesomeCarsForCash.
2. Give me some categories that David tweets about: Make hashtags more fundamental to Twitter. In fact, let me and David choose 1-6 hashtags and let me categorize each of my tweets and people can subscribe only to the tweets they want to. For instance, I would use the categories #EmergingTech #entrepreneurship #startup #Ottawa #bitching #friends. Some of my tweets could be interesting to very different people.
If twitter could achieve this, I’d use twitter a whole lot more (and love it).
