Twitter has faced a series of challenges in recent months as most people know.  They have had to give up many of their main features in order to keep the site running.  There have also been a host of competitors, knock-offs, and businesses generally straying into their turf.  I am talking about Yammer, Pownce, Laconica, and any one using Laconica.  Twitter still has a large market share, but they are going to have to work to keep it.

The first thing I would like to see twitter provide is smaller communities.  The thing most of these new solutions offer is a smaller community.  Yammer allows your community to be your business and Laconica allows your community to be who ever you want it to be.  Twitter could cover many communities and easily.  If twitter just allowed it's users to enter into a community then that community could have it's own public feed and sub-communities users could subscribe to.  That would make a public time-line manageable and allow users to actually meet new people and friends with like interests.  So we could subscribe to the tech community, and watch that time line for people that have similar interests,  if we find tech is just too general we could then subscribe to tech/gaming.  That would allow us to see only people interested in gaming.  It would be even better if you could have many of these time lines.

An even better improvement ,but more time consuming to create, would be to build these communities with individual posts.  This would be implemented using a bot or scanner that could read the contents of each tweet and then sort them into each community.  This would be helpful because twitter users would only have to subscribe to communities they are interested in and not worry about entering themselves into the proper community.  With smaller communities twitter would be very difficult to overcome.

I would also like to see the hopes of Bear Hug Camp come true, and have twitter work with the rest of the micro-blogging or messaging community.  This would make twitter much more useful being able to subscribe to a user of  Laconica or even Pownce.  I would also like to see the type of innovations that can be engineered when people are given tools to manipulate twitter.  The most interesting twitter use I have seen so far is andy_house, a house wired to twitter that shows it's electricty usage in several different ways.  I feel given more support the community could do far better though.

Finally, I would like to see better integration of pictures, audio, and video.  I know there are other sites that fit this bill already, but I think twitter could stay true to its principles and still implement these features.  If twitter users could simply state whether they wanted to receive posts with video, audio, or pictures, this could go a long way to please all users. They could even just allow users to send links that activate the picture or video on the same page as the tweet when they click on the link.  So, we receive a tweet that says Video: Dancing Idiot , we want to watch so we click on it and a pop-up comes on screen with our dancing idiot video.  If we don't want to watch this video we just never click and never have to see it.

I love twitter and if it's creators truly have their heart in it, twitter could blow the competition away.  However, twitter will have to start moving forward and find ways to better serve it's users.  It's a tough market lets hope twitter is in it for the long haul.

Digg Link: http://digg.com/design/Twitter_Wish_List