I love you Twitter but you need to listen to users

I joined Twitter in March 2007 and 150k tweets later I want to tell Twitter a few things that may help Twitter better the user experience and make users stay and get more users. (BTW in open disclosure I own a few stocks in Twitter, that I bought to show my support) Here are some features that may drive more usage for Twitter.

• Custom Home Page: When I first open Twitter I need to be able to customize my home screen. Everyday I open Twitter and click on Notifications to see who has engaged with me. I then have to look for @SuePalkaFox5DC to see what she has tweeted about the weather. I work for @SurefireSocial and I look for people to engage there or Retweet. To do any of these things I have to go through several clicks/search or use another website/app like HootSuite or Tweetdeck. I only mentioned 2 or 3 things but I have more thoughts on this if anyone at Twitter wants to get in touch.
• Customizable Timeline(s): My next activity on Twitter is to find interesting content to read or share. This is hard, I have to either create lists and look at them or search for users like author and management guru Tom Peters or Harvard Business Review and this involves several clicks and searches.
• Schedule Tweets: I check Twitter early in the morning and at night and very few times during the day. I would love to spread my share of Twitter updates and of course to do that I have to go to Buffer or Hootsuite. For heaven’s sake buy buffer and add these features to Twitter.
• Create Automatic Lists: Using user behavior, why not create automatic lists and give me suggestions so I can use them. Formulists did it and so did SocialBro, why not Twitter.
• Group Conversations: I am actually missing my weekly #nostalgiachat to write this article. Why not provide a easy way to create a group conversation feature. You can do that today using Tweetchat, Twubs but that is leaving Twitter again. Tweetchats or Twitter parties are not going away.
• Stop Franken Features: The introduction of Moments was redundant as we already had trending tweets and the power of Twitter is in the real time nature of the feed. I am still not sure how the new Timeline is going to be, so far I think it is interesting. I would focus on things that make people leave Twitter for another program to get what Twitter should be offering in the first place
• Analytics: When I need to know how many impressions are created I have to go to Tweetreach or another tool. If I want a trend of my followers, I have to go to TwitterCounter. Twitter has made good strides in analytics but still a long way to go.
• Make it Easy to take our money: In both my previous companies, I wanted to advertise on Twitter. Most Twitter execs I met were not interested in talking to me about advertising. Seems like they wanted to talk to large agencies or top dollar advertisers. Twitter could have been like Uber, making it easy to take my money and let me test advertising. They would have made more revenue. We spent the budget on LinkedIn and got our money’s worth.
• Alerts: For small businesses who cannot be on Twitter, why not provide a service to them to give them alerts when they are mentioned on Twitter, not just by searching or getting all @mentions Oh Wait! They have to subscribe to Mention.net or twilert.com or SocialSprout or many others. Why not just shut down Twitter web and apps and just let others use the Twitter API?
• Easy to onboard: If you start using Twitter without help, you probably will get confused at the choice and onboarding process. As part of the class my students of XCPD-732 at Georgetown University have to open a Twitter account. Many of my students are communication and marketing professionals and for first time users engaging on Twitter is as confusing as it was for me in 2007.
• Trumpet your good features: Twitter has some great features that they don’t trumpet. Have you seen @support on Twitter. Great job. I think security wise Twitter has fixed the spammy link problem a long time ago by supposedly passing every link through Twitter’s own t.co. Never heard of anyone getting a spammy link. Twitter could easily use their short URL feature and beat bit.ly as a short url and analytics combined.

Since starting on Twitter in 2007, I have lost many of my friends to Facebook. Some of them are still updating Twitter but that's part of a strategy of multiplying their content across networks. I use Chrome apps?—?Klout, Buffer along with Twitter web app, very often it seems like Twitter themselves do not want me to use their app and use a third party app. Jack, please fix this.

Would love to hear your thoughts on these points and what you think Twitter should do to make us Twitter lovers feel good about being on Twitter. BTW like Google , Twitter should recreate this listhttps://twitter.com/twitter/lists/team that appears on search results for Twitter employees.

Your turn Jack Dorsey, @leslieberland, Omid Kordestani, adam bain 

Published first on my medium account