Dear Santa,

This year, I’ve fallen in love with Twitter.  You remember I sent my first tweet just over a year ago, and I’ve never looked back.  I launched this blog one year ago, and Twitter connected me with many helpful people.

This Christmas, I’d really appreciate it if you could just change a few things on the service for me and a few hundred million users.  Here’s my list:

I’m always getting direct messages saying things like:

“look at this pic of you!”

“someone caught you in this video.”

“Horrible things about you!”

“find out who unfollowed you.”

“Early investors got filthy rich.”

“Someone is making cruel things up about you!”

I don’t know what these are, and I think they may be viruses.  Why not create an easy way to report and remove these?  Or a “spam alert” button?  Then Twitter could sweep them away for good.

Oh, and the people doing this, would you mind putting coal in their stockings?

If you can’t figure out how to fix that, maybe you could change the messages to something motivational?  Maybe something like “you rock!”  You could be specific and say, “I’ve read all your posts, even the first one!”

You love colors (at least red).  Just for the fun of it, can we add the ability to tweet in colors, underline, and add italics or other word processing basics?

Would you add a flag for categories?  I’d love to flag anything with offensive pictures, profanity, etc. to eliminate all of that from the twitter stream.

When I follow some people on my iphone, if they have protected tweets, it says “FORBIDDEN” if I follow them.  It makes me feel like I will be on the naughty list when really it just means the account is locked until they accept my request.  Why not change it to “PROTECTED”?

Santa, speaking of Direct Messages, I’d love to be able to click on a person and see more about them right then and there.  Right now, I have to leave the DM’s and go back and search for the person.  Not easy.

I love the feature where I can mark all the messages as “read” all at once.  How about also adding one to “delete” all direct messages at once?

I’d love to make better use of lists.  Why not make it much easier for me to add someone to an existing list?

When people retweet me, I’d love to automatically add them to a list to thank them.  Why not make it easier?  Maybe even add them to a holiday card list for next year.

When I am sending a link to a Web page, why not shorten the link automatically?

How about searching for tweets just from my own timeline?

I’d love to see people who frequently interact with me saved in a place so I can remember to send them Christmas cards.  Maybe the best ones, some chocolate.  And the ones who aren’t so nice, some fruit cake.

Many times, I click to see something and, as I do, I notice a tweet I want to read.  But, it’s too late.  Can you add a “go back” button so I don’t miss it anymore?

If I have a spelling error in my tweet, could you have it warn me?  Better yet, anytime I’m about to tweet something that’s really ignorant, offensive, stupid or just plain crazy, can you have a little alarm bell sound?

And, Santa, maybe you should consider joining Twitter yourself. There’s a lot of reasons you shouldn’t avoid Twitter any longer.

Finally, Santa, world peace would really be nice this year.

I realize you’re busy, so if you do even a few of these things, then I will give you extra cookies this year!

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