Marcelo Calbucci

There is a beauty about the 140 character limitation. It makes people work harder on their tweet to convey what they want to say. It saves the people reading the tweet time and sometimes you are just in awe of how witty your friends can be. I don’t think Twitter should ever increase the 140 characters limit, however, there is a lot of other limitations on the service that need to be re-thought so it can find new uses.

I have 3 scenarios which are not possible on Twitter today, but they could easily enable it by making some small changes.

Local Targetted Tweets

This is something I wanted from the beginning. I want to mark some of my tweets as “for local tweeps only”. In other words, I want to put out a tweet that doesn’t go to all my 3,300 followers, but only to those who said they are in the Seattle-metro area. Why? Because of the informal nature of Twitter, I like to write about the weather, a restaurant, ask for tips of where to take the kids on the weekend, etc. Two thirds of my followers don’t care about it. Can’t do anything with it, and it just adds to the noise they receive. Yes, Twitter could go one step further and enable Groups, and allow you to Tweet to a group, but I think that would add too much to the user experience. Local tweets is the one scenario where it makes a lot of sense.

Private Followers

Recently I was thinking about a product that would be much more interesting if I could create a Twitter account, make the account public, yet, hide the follower list. Why would anyone want to hide the follower list? Simple: Because following that account might not be something people would want others to know. Imagine accounts about tips for teenagers gay to come out, or any other content where you feel self-conscious about others knowing you care about it. This could be done by having accounts with private followers, or giving each individual control as to which other twitter accounts they are following can be seen by the public. Think about how Twitter is slowly replacing RSS and how RSS is a completely anonymous “follow” scheme.

Authorized Followers

This is more of a fringe situation a friend told me he wanted, but imagine you are ok with your Twitter stream being public but you want to pre-approve who can follow you. Why? Maybe you care about who appears on your Twitter page followers list. Maybe you want to show a level of exclusivity.



Overall Twitter has not done much in terms of account controls and some of those can only be achieved if the core infrastructure supports them, so the whole annotation is not going to work by itself. That’s my request of the day.