The Twitter feature I’d pay money for (Twitter, Tweetdeck, are you listening?)

Everyone has an opinion on how twitter can make money, some more creative than others. Twitter could choose to compel existing members to pay just by virtue of the role it now plays in personal and business communications, or they could add premium features. Why yes, I do have one particular feature request in mind…

Groups. Yes, I know that many third party clients now offer the ability to create groups: I have groups in Tweetdeck at home as well as at work. But the groups aren’t synced: in fact, I have DIFFERENT groups and there is always a moment of reorientation to find what I’m looking for.

Now it’s possible that this makes sense: at work I may want to segment individuals by topics I need to focus on at work, and my priorities at home may be different. But it would be wonderful to have the option to create a group and have it persist across multiple clients. If this isn’t something for Twitter to take on, I’d just as happily use a third-party that offered this feature.

Imagine creating a Tweetdeck account (rather than just logging into Twitter via Tweetdeck) that would allow you to assign your contacts to groups, and then selectively show them on a per-instance basis. That way, I could have my “real friends” filter, my “influentials” filter, my “non-profit” filter, and only view “non-profit” in the office… unless I was working from home (as I just so happen to be doing today!).

This would actually solve another frequent request that people have from Tweetdeck: auto-logout when another instance is opened. Currently Tweetdeck doesn’t have a great way to know if you’re logged in elsewhere, but if there were a Tweetdeck service you were using, a session could possibly expire when you logged in elsewhere. This could help with those Twitter API problems, and ensuring that messages were synched across locations.

Would you pay for persistent Twitter groups? What Twitter features would you be willing to pay for?

EDIT: After I wrote this post but before I published it, Twitter confirmed paid pro accounts were on the way. I pushed this live as soon as I heard, let’s see what features these pro accounts end up having!

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