Twitter Feature Idea: View your friend's Twitter home page

by phil on Saturday Nov 22, 2008 2:26 AM
ideas for business

This is for anybody who is working on creating a Twitter app and maybe wants an extra feature to set it apart. However, there's a good chance this feature already exists given that Twitter has spawned an incredible number of mash-ups and apps.

The idea is that I want to know what the Twitter home page looks like for my friends. I get the feeling that for a good handful of my friends, their home pages are 50% my posts, and then 50% their friends'. This is because I'm following 33 users, and a lot of my friends are maybe following 10-15. As a result, I usually post enough to match the volume of posts I see on my Twitter home page. This means maybe only 5-10% of the posts on my home page are from me. To me, it doesn't appear that I'm spamming anybody. But to my friends, I may be the most active user, and so I might be dominating their home pages.

I suspect this is happening because a third of the posts on my Twitter home page are from peterc. To him, I'm sure he feels fine since he is following 310 users. For him, his posting volume doesn't look like spam either. (<3 peterc, btw.)

In any event, I want to verify how the experience is for other users when they see my posts.

There's got to be an app that already does this, so if you know of one, add it to the comments. Either way, I think Twitter should make a plug-in architecture or app system like facebook (only private-facing, though), so that you can enable experimental features, just like you can choose from ~20 extra features in Gmail Labs (which are great, btw. As a side note, this is a much better alternative to feature bloat).