On the blog of Internet consultancy CenterNetworks, their CEO Allen Stern offers what he terms “Five Quick Suggestions To Improve Twitter.”

Let’s go over his suggestions, and my reaction to each.

Suggestion #1 - Groups

Let me organize the people/companies I am following into groups and then decide how to deal with each group individually. For example, I would like groups such as: family, friends, coworkers, companies, bitter rivals, etc. Then, for example, I can set the family to always text and message, companies to only send me texts during the week, coworker twitters should always forward to cell and so on. Right now its a clusterfu** and every time I add a person to follow, I have to individually set what happens when it would be way more efficient as a group. If I want to make a change, I do it at the group level instead of the individual level.

My reaction- I agree wholeheartedly. Twitter needs to be compartmentalizable. I know that’s not a word, but let’s start that and see if it becomes a meme.

Suggestion #2 - NO MORE TINYURL

Ok, this one baffles me. I assume Twitter wanted to ship a product so they used TinyURL to handle the URLs that we put in our twitters. Sounds great right? Well think again bub! Most of the twitterheads say that this tool is to create a mini-blog, but what happens if the TinyURL service is out-of-service or goes under? Then what? Goodbye millions of URLs. So Twitter, take some of your new bankroll and build (or buy) your own TinyURL that will live within the Twitter domain. Then at least all is not lost if this outside service crashes.

My reaction- To tell you the truth I never got the concept of TinyUR. I need to know more.

Suggestion #3 - Better Performance

I know it’s kind of a joke these days but it’s time for Twitter to stay up for a week with no downtime. It’s pretty bad when Vegas has odds on downtime for a Web app. With Skype going down this week there were several comparisons made to the downtime for Twitter. You have a bankroll, use it wisely. Forget the Aeron chairs.

My Opinion: Less downtime the better. Let users know in advance when downtimes are scheduled.

Suggestion #4 - Design Improvements

Check out Yappd and while it’s probably too Web 2.0 (whatever that means), it certainly is more polished than Twitter. Let’s get rid of the Arial/Helvetica ladies and gents and move into 2007. While Twitter allows you to change your background image, I assert that it is not enough. Why not let me customize the style sheet as I see fit? Provide a class list and let me go to town because Twitter is about each of us, correct?

My opinion- This is the best of Allen’s suggestions. When we sign up for Twitter we should be given a Preferences menu where we can choose style, font, and more. We should also be able to customize the look of our Twitter for different groups of other Twitterers we Twitter with (Hey, I guess using the word “Twitter” in that context shows that “Twitter” is on the way to becoming a verb!)

Suggestion #5 - Threading

Please let me thread especially when the following person is replying to someone outside my network. When I see “@jowyang - I agree, Yankees are better” - how in the heck do I know to what the person is referring to? What are the Yankees better than in this example? This system is more than just a 1-1 text message app. We have followers and we follow hence we need a way to follow intelligently.

My opinion- I couldn’t agree more. Twitter messages should be numbered. The tricky part to me, though, would be not to “over-tree” Twitter message strings. Overly complex, and citing specific Twitter messages could be an exercise frought with numbers, decimals, and an unacceptably high PITA factor.

But hey, that’s why usability experts are available, no?