recently, there have been a lot of articles of the sort ‘x number of ways to improve twitter’. what i find striking about these articles is that pownce, a twitter competitor, has already implemented most of these improvements that people are requesting to be added to twitter.

what we see is that either 1) people recommended an improvement or found something missing in twitter, which pownce later implemented in its version of the micro-blogging platform, or 2) pownce foresaw the need for some functionality and implemented it, which people liked and subsequently felt was missing from twitter. either way, this shows how pownce is really what many expect the next iteration of twitter to be. here’s a look at 7 ways in which pownce improves upon twitter.

1. groups: pownce lets you organize your friends into groups and then allows you to send messages to sets of people.

2. better url handling: rather than using a 3rd party service like tinyurl (which can be unreliable at times), on pownce you can use the actual url without worrying about wasting characters (there is no limit to message size).

3 . better design: if there’s one thing that pownce really nailed, it is the beautiful design. the interface is also skinnable, which means there will be something for everyone.

4. better message handling: there are a couple of ways in which message handling on pownce is much better than on twitter. 1) there is no minimum message size, 2) you can send messages to the public, to your friends, to a self-created group, and to individuals, 3) all replies to a message are threaded, 4) you can forward messages to other people.

5. privacy settings: only messages you sent to the public can be seen by everyone. other message can only be seen by the subset they are sent to.

6. more versatility: in addition to sending messages, you can also share files and create events. there are also much better options for which notifications you would like to receive.

7. friends: pownce makes it a lot easier to look for and add friends. if you go to the ‘add friends’ page, you are shown friends of your friends to see if you know or want to add any of them. in addition you can also search for people to add as friends.

the point of this post isn’t to say that pownce is better, surely there are several things that twitter still does better or that pownce simply lacks. while the twitter versus pownce versus [insert micro-blogging tool name here] debate will rage on, the bottom line is that though pownce is far from revolutionary or even a totally new product, it does fix a ton of things that are wrong with twitter (and the prevailing micro-blogging platform) and that we can expect to be improved in twitter 2.0.

References:

1. Five Quick Suggestions to Improve Twitter by Allen Stern
2. Six Ways to Improve Twitter by Josh Lowensohn
3. Introducing Pownce, Like Twitter But Better by Hong Kiat