Twitter Search: Fix That.

If there's one thing I love it's the ability to find whatever I need on the Internet in little to no time at all. I can tell you who played a character in a TV show in a matter of seconds. I can translate a sentence with the blink of an eye. So can someone please tell me why, in an age when I can hold my cell phone up to the radio and have it tell me what song is playing, searching for content on the world's fastest growing social media site is the most difficult thing in the world?

Case in point: a few weeks ago at the Television Critic's Association, the networks gave out some fabulous swag. Overwhelmed with awesome blog material, I held out on blogging about the custom Glee soda and figured that eventually I would get around to it. Today when I popped on over to Twitter, I realized that I'd made a huge mistake: I hadn't actually marked the tweet as a favorite or retweeted the picture at all. It was like the kiss of death. I sadly changed my blog topic, but it inspired me to realize that there are some SERIOUS things that need to be fixed with the web-based Twitter platform. These things have probably been said left & right, but they haven't been said here.

The Picture That Started This Whole Mess

1. Search a User's Tweets

I know exactly which of my Twitter friends tweeted the awesome picture of the Glee soda, but in that time they've had many a tweet since then. How about a search box on a user's page? The ability to search for a keyword on a user's page would greatly help people who sincerely care about what SPECIFIC individuals are saying about their brand or if they're saying anything at all. Does this work for big brands? Probably not, but there are far more small businesses than there are Coca Cola's & McDonald's in the world.

2. Search By Date

I also know exactly what date the awesome Twitpic surfaced, but there's no way for me to narrow my friend's tweets to that specific date. The Twitter advanced seach feature, which I'm sure most users don't know about, doesn't help either. Let me ask this, why give me the option to choose a date range that's too old?

What if, in 3 weeks Snooki gets arrested again (please God) and I want to see what people were saying about her when her drunken self first got nabbed by Seaside police? Google will help me find the date of that occurence, but then Twitter will say that it was too long ago for them to be able to help me. That's not okay. If Twitter tells me that they're refusing to give me that information cause Snooki is far too annoying for them to pay attention to, that's another story. That would never happen, regardless of how much I would love them if it did. A calendar option would fix this.

A calendar option added to users pages would vastly improve searchability. I don't want to keep hitting the More button until I find what I need. In fact, the More button is like a Twitter black hole that sucks you into a 140 character vortex of despair.

3. Keyword Search Tracking

Please, please, please tell me Twitter why do I have to use a client like Tweet Deck or Hootsuite to have an easy way to track what people are saying about my brand? I don't want to keep searching "Motivators" in that little search box. I want have a little tab on my profile dedicated to keyword tracking. I want to use Twitter.com because I love you, and I'd rather not cheat on you with one of your clients.

4. View Conversation AS Conversations

You know what sucks? That I see this:

If I'm someone else viewing the @MotivatorsStaff profile, I don't know what's so funny. If this is me 2 weeks from now, I probably forgot what was funny. But do I have the ability to view the WHOLE conversation with one click? No, instead I get redirected to individual status messages. The in reply to link is yet another time sucking black hole. I don't have all day and again, I'd really prefer if I didn't have to go to Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to be able to do this.

5. Image Search

This is probably the most difficult to achieve because there are a number of ways that users upload pictures to Twitter. Howver having the ability to search through a user's tweets that include images on Twitter (rather than Twitpic or another photo sharing service) would allow users to easily search for image content.

Those are just my general gripes about Twitter, since I use it everyday to monitor Motivators social media presence. It'd be swell if I could do that one twitter itself without having to use external client software to do so.