Twhirl and Alert Thingy are both well built little apps that are getting a lot of attention lately, but neither of them have rethought the way we need to communicate at all.  With Twitter in the picture, we can no longer use the same paradigms from email, RSS, or even IM.  Twitter is omni-directional, mobile, time-sensitive, and overwhelming in quantity.  Voices are rising louder and louder complaining about how they are drowning in twitter messages, and so far applications have only been concerned with enabling users to get even more content, not less.  Every day I realize the harsh reality that I cannot keep track of the entire Internet, and I quite literally dream of a service that would lower the signal to noise ratio.  Here’s where everyone (including Twitter) is missing the mark:

• Discussion fragmentation
  Multiple services have been spending a lot of time implementing comment functionality, but all they’re doing is creating more places I have to check for feedback.  I’ve already been noticing this problem thinking about lifestreaming in general.  When I post a picture to my tumblelog, should people post comments on my site or on Flickr?  I love how Alert Thingy enables people to comment within the flow, but until those comments become directly associated with the original content they’re only making life harder.  The last thing I want is to have yet another conversation to manage.
• Dealing with Twitter whores
  I used to abide by the “what are you doing” mandate pretty strictly and limited myself to 1 or 2 messages a day, but a few months ago I started getting too involved to hold back.  And of course, I’m not the only one.  The example I always use here is local Twitter hero Nate Ritter.  He’s one of the most insightful and engaging users I know, but sometimes I just don’t have time for as much insight as he generates.  He was the source of inspiration for this post I made months ago on Get Satisfaction that lead to the concepts of user controlled squelch (put someone on mute for a while) and automatic rate limiting (aka Nate limiting) when someone is communicating faster than your desired threshold.
• Identify only important messages
  But how do you know which messages are still important?  Dave is the numbers guy who is thinking about how to do this algorithmically, but one of the key methods he’s identified is based on how many replies a message stimulates.  It sounds pretty obvious, but implementing this functionality in such a way that it generates individually useful results is actually a bigger challenge than it looks, since it also requires knowing each user’s baseline engagement and some FOAF analysis (a conversation is more important when your friends are participating).
• Filtering
  Everyone’s focus is on getting more messages so you don’t miss anything.  What about the messages you already know you don’t care about?  SXSW was a perfect example of this.  I had real friends stop following me because the messages generated by this event were overwhelming and irrelevant, so I can’t say I blame them.  I did the best I could to use the #sxsw hashtag…if only track had the converse functionality of block, a bulk of attention management problems could be avoided without doing any other messy priority analysis.
• Contact management
  I don’t have one big cloud of friends in real life, so why do I still have to interact with Twitter the same way?  I want to keep track of what’s going on through defined groups to provide a better context of who they are, or hell…implement some better functionality to remind me who they are in the first place.  And with the exception of turning notifications on or off, everyone on twitter is considered equally important, which isn’t sustainable without severely limiting mobile functionality.  Sean Bonner recently posted some good ideas around this, too.  Some people I want to get updates from 24/7 wherever I am, some people I’m content to hear from when I happen to be at my computer.  Other people (and especially most track messages) I just want to stay abreast of in a daily digest email.
• Twitter is ignorant
  Regardless of what I happen to be doing any given day, Twitter continues to blast away.  I’m already publishing my availability information in the cloud via Google Calendar and my IM status, and somebody desperately needs to start taking advantage of this information.  If Twitter were smart, it could be so much more than a glorified IM client.  Not only would the service know better than to send me notifications when I’m in an important meeting, it would also behave more like a mobile command line for users to ask “What is Lisa doing?”.  Although nowhere near ready for public consumption, Dave wrote a Twitter bot with the AI to answer such a question with “Well Dave isn’t in front of IM, but he has class in 10 minutes, so he might be in transit. But his phone is in the charger, so he either forgot his phone or is oversleeping.”  Now that’s revolutionary.

I confess, Dave and I have spent hours whiteboarding, wireframing, and debating these ideas.  We’re consumed with it.  We know how to address some of the issues we’ve raised, but for others we either don’t have the resources or can’t cleanly implement a solution without being Twitter.

But information wants to be free, and I’ve been about to pop for three months thinking about all this.  We’ll still be working on our own solution, but there’s sadly only so much a statistics student and a girl with big ideas can do to change the world.

So as always, if Technarium can’t get to it first, I damn well better have an invite to the beta.