1. Micro-blogging is indeed the purpose, but it's not nearly the same as blogging. You don't address people in blogs like you do on Twitter. You expect full replies. It's not a conversation. A blog is simply a discussion followed by points for or against that discussion topic.

3. Trending topics are fairly useless as it stands. I personally would like to see a “trending topics” feature amongst a one-level deep view fo your followers. This presents an interesting dilemma, however, in terms of algorithms and such.

In addition to everything else, I'd prefer to see Twitter “let loose” on it's tight-knitted grip when it comes to API development. Every feature you want, I want, your friends want, could be easily addressed by this.

But then again, that's just me.

1. Micro-blogging is indeed the purpose, but it's not nearly the same as blogging. You don't address people in blogs like you do on Twitter. You expect full replies. It's not a conversation. A blog is simply a discussion followed by points for or against that discussion topic.

3. Trending topics are fairly useless as it stands. I personally would like to see a “trending topics” feature amongst a one-level deep view fo your followers. This presents an interesting dilemma, however, in terms of algorithms and such.

In addition to everything else, I'd prefer to see Twitter “let loose” on it's tight-knitted grip when it comes to API development. Every feature you want, I want, your friends want, could be easily addressed by this.

But then again, that's just me.

The people I know who use both FB and Twitter (me included) see the former as social and the latter as professional (or “personal brand”). I actively don't want two social networks anyway! Double the effort without any clear reward.

2. Completely agree about the 1m follower use-case being different. Probably other strata in there as well?

3. Not sure about “value.” Trending topics on Twitter tend to be social issues, not professional (*tend* to be, not always). This suggests most of the activity is social. However I don't think threaded comments destroy the notion of social anyway, with FB being the case in point.

4. I completely disagree with you that RTs aren't fundamentally useful. I RT about as much as I invent, usually with commentary. RTs are a way for me to promote bon mots and posts I like while giving the original author full credit. Yes there's “(via @asmartbear)” and perhaps threaded comments could still work in the same manner, but the RT has a certain semantic meaning that I like. I do admit that there's probably a way to do threaded comments such that the role of the RT is subsumed sensibly, in which case that's fine, but I object to your assertions that they're hard to grok etc..

5. I like the idea of keeping threads with the permalink. I don't like the idea of voting etc because the lack of such things is one of the distinguishing features of Twitter. Generally “more RTs” is how you “vote.” I see your point that maybe that's not optimal etc., and I would agree that “because it's always been that way” is not automatically a good argument against change, but sometimes it is!

In general I don't want Twitter to develop a lot of “stuff” — options, buttons, etc.. Clearly the simplicity of the mechanism — even with complexity of the use-cases — is one of its primary benefits.

I would add that Twitter needs to be careful to make any changes backward-compatible and incremental to avoid screwing up the massive ecosystem of API users — clients, services, etc.. IMO that ecosystem is another huge reason Twitter is successful. Consider that most tweets don't come from “Web.”

Thanks for the interesting food for thought!