Five Suggestions For Twitter's Next CEO

Fail Whale At Night, Posters Delight

With speculation rising as to who the next person to fill the seat will be, I think we might be missing the point -- which is, making the site more usable to more people, so that it goes beyond its current dependency on its heaviest users. Let's get into the weeds, at more than 140 characters.

1) Put in daily post limits.

The single best point about Twitter is how expansive it can get when a topic gets in heavy rotation, with sudden flurries on topics far out-pacing the abilities of traditional journalism to compete. This is also Twitter's worst point.

A quick and simple way to fix this is to limit the number of Tweets that one account can issue in a day (I'd go for less than ten, myself, but I tend to be diligent about the editing). Do this, and your content providers will take more time crafting their words, and less time just reacting to what everyone else is reacting to.

2) Automate hashtags, but don't count that against the character count.

As much fun as it is to come up with your own hashtag words, this doesn't really make for a better platform, or easier search points for general users. What I'd like to see happen is for the service to start scanning works, then adding hashtags for the user to opt out of. I'm sure the v1 of this will be wonky, but in the long run, you'll save a declining asset from the tragedy of the commons.

3) Add micro-payment and bitcoin tip jars as a social option.

Favoriting Tweets and re-tweeting content to your followers is nice and all, but if Twitter is killing blogs (it is) in many categories, you really should try to do something to get back those penny-ante blog publisher CPMs. Twitter will likely take a cut of this action, which is only fair, and helps to tell a diversifying revenue strategy over time.

4) Get more local to get more competitive.

Why did Yelp grow in the age of Twitter? Because Twitter never conditioned its users to expect or even select content based on their local region. This should be relatively easy to engineer, and make the service more likely to pick up a bigger footprint in narrowcast advertising.

5) Video up.

As much as I'd like the world to stay with text, especially short and pithy amounts of it, it's not what the new to file users are very interested in. There's nothing that exists on Vine that shouldn't be on Twitter, and the fact that the former came on board with little in the way of response from Twitter is not a great moment for the old management. There is still time to get the horse back into the barn, but those doors swung wide.

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