Twitter finally upgrades contact management
One of the greatest challenges of Twitter has always been managing connections that number in the hundreds or even thousands. These new features may not be a silver bullet but will have the Twitterati breathing a sigh of relief.
The new features allow you to manage your connections on Twitter more easily. This means you can spend more time building your social media empire and less time managing it.
You can see the changes by clicking on your ‘followers’ or ‘following’ page. The first thing you will notice is the ability to view connections in an expanded view with their last tweet or a quick list, making it easier to scan through pages of connections.
Followers
A common complaint among Twitter users is how long it takes to go through new followers and decide who to follow back. Now Twitter has added a button that allows you to follow users back next to each person on the ‘followers’ page.
By using the expanded view to read new followers profiles, you can quickly determine if they might have common interests. Of course, discerning users will still click through to each profile to see if the person has substance in addition to style.
Following
The ‘following’ page now includes a menu that allows you to take action on contacts quickly and easily. The button expands into a menu that allows you to mention, direct message, unfollow or block the connection as needed.
Obviously if the person isn’t following you, the direct message option won’t show up, but you’ll still be able to mention, unfollow or block them. This makes it much easier to connect with and prune who you are following as necessary.
What’s Missing?
Since this is the first step that Twitter has taken toward contact management on the service, there is still tons of room for improvement. It would be ludicrous to expect friends list management or expanded contact information from Twitter at this point.
One simple upgrade would be to add these new buttons to profile pages so that you can take more actions in less space. Sure, all these functions are available on profile pages, but not in so elegant a fashion.
Another annoyance is that Twitter lists your contacts based on when you started following them or when they started following you. While this is helpful for seeing your new followers quickly, it makes it nearly impossible to find people. The easiest solution would be to allow users to sort by username.
These changes, however, are admittedly a major improvement over having to click on each person’s profile to follow or unfollow them. Now all you need to do is go to http://twitter.com/blorge and follow us.
Related Posts:
July 2nd, 2009
I find the new structure for “Following” MUCH less helpful than the previous structure. In the old structure you could esaily see who was following you at a glance. In this new structure you have to laboriously click on every single profile to see if they are or are not following you.
I spend a lot of time dropping people who don’t follow me back. This new structure will make it almost impossible to do this without hiring a full time admin to do it for me.
How has this made it easier to manager my account?