The fact that Twitter is about to celebrate its eighth birthday can be quite surprising for most Twitter users. It only seems like yesterday that the 140-character micro-blogging website was launched. The website was launched on 21 March , 2006 and now has more than 500 million users and the site sees more than 340 million tweets being uploaded every day. Twitter has become the preferred medium of choice for most celebrities and brands to connect with their fans. In fact, the celebrities can command millions of followers on Twitter to whom they can converse with directly.
Twitter is a revolutionary social media website with tweets acting like the SMS of the Internet. The company was also aware of what users wanted and developed many attributes such as the hash-tag which has become the official feature on the website. So now that Twitter is eight years old and has managed to capture the collective attention of Internet users, what more does its loyal users want and expect from it in the near future?
An edit option
Twitter is one of those websites where people really have to think about the tweet before posting it. There are only 140 characters to fit your message in and people are always looking to pack the maximum punch in two or three lines. However, mistakes always occur but Twitter has no edit option. Users must delete entire tweets and rewrite them again even if they want to correct minor typos and to add or delete words and characters. Hopefully, Twitter will bring out an edit option like Facebook does.
More attractive feeds
Even after 8 years, the Twitter feed looks like a messy jumble of hash-tags and poorly written tweets. Users want images, videos and other visual content to be highlighted more prominently like that on Facebook. The company and website will also stand to benefit if they can improve the way tweets are shown on a user’s Twitter feed so that the most relevant tweets are shown first.
Hold the ads
Everybody hates ads on websites but advertisement is a necessary evil. They are the only way some websites can earn revenue. Facebook attracted a lot of backlash with its push towards advertising but it didn’t care. Twitter users are hoping that ads on the website will be more subtle and less intrusive. The company is improving its ads API and partnering with companies to improve ad features. Hopefully users will have the option to mange ads.
More videos
Twitter has never been very conducive to sharing videos but users are hoping that with new deals that Twitter has inked with entertainment companies, they will be able to watch exclusive content via Twitter itself. Users are expecting Twitter and its partners to allow them to watch exclusive TV programs, video clips and movies via tweets. This will also help Twitter capture an audience that is mainly glued to the TV rather than the Internet.
Edit retweets
There are many Twitter users who want to be able to edit tweets before re-tweeting them. Such a feature would allow users to add their opinions to the tweet or change the content a bit to make them more appropriate before re-tweeting them.
Photo by EnoW / Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
