I've been running a local blog for about a year solid and in the past 3 months I've integrated Twitter in hopes of driving targeted traffic.  Much to my surprise, Twitter has been great at delivering a few hundered extra views a week, but obviously not enough to start quitting other campaigns.  However, I have a few thoughts on what Twitter could do to better help businesses manage their profiles.

Referral Tracking

This is the biggest problem I see facing Twitter as a measurable source of traffic.  In server logs the only indication you have that people are coming from twitter, is from either the Twitter.com/home domain or from your own Twitter.com/mybusiness domain.  I would love to see Twitter integrate some sort of referral indicator that showed who was actually following a link or reading my feed.

Currently an arbitrary number of followers does not really indicate how many people are actually reading your tweets.  Comments and stuff are great, but are only a small percentage of people that are actually reading tweets and interested in what your business is about.  Let's get some actual analytics involved Twitter, show me who is actually reading and following my links.

Light Weight In House Tools

Please come out with some in house tools to make Twitter mor useful.  Tweet Deck is ok and other business solutions fill a void, but are not up to par with what can be produced in house.  I dont want bloated software, I want something light weight that I can update from my desktop on, get notifications of mentions, and accurately track those who are following me.  And while we are at it, make sure you support multiple twitter accounts, I will not use my business Twitter account for personal use and vise versa.

Allow Advertising Already

Lastly, come on Twitter, let us start advertising and target all your users.  Look to Google to see how to create unobtrusive advertising models that actually appeal and target your users.  It's obvious that the traffic produced from Twitter is valuable, let us pay for that gold mine of outbound clicks.  While valuable, I'm not sure the time cost of me tweeting equals revenue earned just yet.

I've been using Thunderbird as my primary Email program at work for the past 5 years and it's been annoying me as of late.  There have been a handful of tasks I was looking to accomplish, namely archiving which is becoming a pain in the ass.  Sure, some of it is my fault, but isn't it the job of great software developers to create quality solutions to consumer mess ups?

Oddly enough I can't even find a usable plugin or Mozilla Add On that allows me to easily archive all my messages.  And trust me, at over 3200, the time for archiving has came and went, I have no choice.  Searching through all of those emails is an exercise in futility, especially considering most searches are using similar search texts and it's only their recency that's important.  Perhaps if I had a higher powered computer this wouldn't have become an issue, but it is.

So I've taken the step most Thunderbird users have when wanting to archive emails, I've created folders and began manually dragging and dropping.  Or, specifically I've been highlighting and right clicking and selecting to move my messages to their respective manually created folders.  However, this just doesn't feel like a valid way to archive, since the messages are still held within the email program.  There needs to be a method for archiving in the sense that they are removed from the Thunderbird's tentacles and easily zipped up and stored nicely away on my 60gb hard drive shelf. (yes, small hard drive at work. -cldnails)

I'm manually archiving now and storing years into folders, hoping to speed up the software and more importantly Thunderbird search.  Unfortunately I may have to archive manually even further by creating monthly archive folders, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed it won't come to that.  But even worse, if this doesn't adequately improve my Thunderbird experience it may be time to go back to Outlook and it's automatic archiving features.  Gasp!