8 things Jack Dorsey could do right now to make Twitter so much better

Twitter has begun experimenting with its feed, by showing some people tweets that are not in chronological order. The test seems to be about whether Twitter becomes more useful if you show people the most relevant, or most viral tweets, instead of merely the most recent one.

A lot of people - hardcore Twitter users - don't like it. They don't like change.

But Twitter needs to change, because it is being left behind by alternative social media platforms like Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram, all of whom have audiences that have far eclipsed Twitter. One of the reasons Twitter is being left behind is that reverse-chrono order is often not the best way to read tweets. It sometimes makes Twitter feel like a never-ending burst of random nonsense. Sometimes the nonsense is charming or serendipitous. But a lot of the time it's just chaotic and unhelpful.

Twitter is still great for seeing what just happened 3 minutes ago. But it's not great for anything else. And Twitter seems to have missed major movements in social media, such as messaging (WhatsApp) and photos (Instagram) or both at the same time (Snapchat).

So now that Jack Dorsey is back as CEO, and now that he is fulfilling his promise to change Twitter for the better, here are eight small tweaks I'd love to see that would make Twitter so much more useful.

1. Give us the ability to edit tweets. Sometimes I post a really good tweet, and it goes viral. I'd love to be able to add to it - like add a link to a relevant story - once I can see that a tweet is successful. You can edit posts on Facebook or Instagram. But on Twitter, your tweets are carved in (virtual) stone, forever, unless you delete them. Let us edit our tweets!
2. Use hotlinks. Twitter is constrained to 140 characters and it is not helpful when some of those characters are used up by HTML code for the link you're trying to draw people's attention to. Facebook is great at hotlinking text to an external web page. Tweets should do this too.
3. An easier way to namecheck people we know. Right now, you have to manually type in the name of someone you're trying to tweet "@". It's easy to get wrong. Twitter's search is OK for finding people, but making sure you're talking to the right Joe Smith can be laborious. Adding someone's name to a tweet should be easy, not a chore. Again, Facebook is very good at this.
4. Better handling of photos. Twitter once tried to acquire Instagram, so you know that there is huge value in being able to see nice photos. Twitter does not display images well, however. This can be redesigned. (And yes I know Twitter has already begun this.)
5. A parallel news feed that shows me most relevant tweets, like Nuzzel or Facebook. Tweet discovery is actually quite difficult on Twitter. If you didn't see the tweet right then, you probably missed it forever. I'd like to be able to customise my Twitter so that I can flip between the chrono firehose, or choose to see the most viral tweets from the past hour or day or week or more.
6. Make Twitter Analytics a tab or function in the app. Most people don't even know that Twitter Analytics exists. It's fun to see how well - or how badly - your tweets do. Let people see this in the app!
7. A Chartbeat for tweets. I'd like to see the larger movement of traffic, trends and tweets on the platform, maybe on a country, region or city basis. I'd like to see them swirling and changing the way Chartbeat shows news stories for publishers. Chartbeat is an app that ranks the popularity of content in a continuously updated, animated way. News publishers use it so they can see what is popular and what is not on their sites. I'd love to see something similar for the whole of Twitter. I know what is big inside my Twitter, but aside from trending words on Twitter I don't really know what is hot and what is not.
8. Longform tweets via an extra click. It's constrained media, 140 characters, we get it! Part of the interest of Twitter is the way it forces you to get to the point. But Instagram successfully encourages people to keep it short and still lets people wax on at length, occasionally. Why not let us use a format in which anyone who clicks on a tweet can jump through into an extended tweet to get the full rant?

Disclosure: The author owns stock in Twitter.