A way to make Twitter better
I *almost* love Twitter. I use it sporadically to either fill a bit of time or to buoy a moment of low brain activity. It has never taken a consistent place in my day. I just figured out why.
The Problem
Twitter is great for following colleagues and professionals who use it to disseminate interesting articles, resources, facts, etc... It is also great for keeping up with some details of friends lives. It can be frustrating, however, when you log in and find dozens of posts about the personal side of your professional contacts. It gums up the works and causes interesting tweets to drop well below the fold (or several ajax folds).
A Solution
Add a personal / professional switch for each tweet. This tweet is personal... this one is professional. On the reader's side, we have the simple ability to filter our stream. "I just want to see the professional tweets." *Click*
The draw of Twitter is simplicity, so I'm trying to add as little extra complication as I can imagine. Some people may never use it and many will probably chronically mis-tag their tweets, another good hearted tech eccentricity to quip about in podcasts and on blogs.
Taking this a step farther. Twitter could completely voluntarily add the ability to tag tweets with any sort of boolean, or even category-type tags. I know this breaks their wall of 'everything in the tweet' and that the # tag is their gift to the universe for this sort of thing. These solutions, however, would allow those tweeters who want to use it to create more in-depth semantics in their tweets, which would allow those readers who want to sift through the noise the ability to do so.
[Update: Twitter is moving in this direction with Annotations:http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_twitter_annotations_mean.php -http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Annotations-Overview. The only question is how these will be integrated into the popular UIs to drive behavior. Looking forward to seeing how this plays out.]