Bill Simmons, ESPN's star sports writer and founder of ascendant online sports and pop culture journal Grantland, also happens to be a heavy Twitter user. As such, he has a few friendly words of advice for the site, based on his own occasionally frustrating experiences.
We've carefully considered Simmons' wisdom, and concur with his conclusions. Read the two suggestions below.
I can't believe Twitter hasn't added one of the following two wrinkles …
a. Adding a checklist to your follower list so you could follow however many people you want, but "check" the ones you want to actually show up in your feed. This would prevent wounded feelings (if you're not following a friend who's secretly bitter that you're not following them, which means either they tweet too much or their tweets suck) and clogged Twitter feeds (if you have a couple of friends who post 40 to 50 times a day and clog your feed up, only you can't unfollow them because they're your friends).
b. Adding a button so you can make your follower list private. Do you realize how many more porn stars, strippers and hoochie mamas would be followed by athletes and rappers if nobody could see whom they were following? (Well, not you, Amar'e Stoudemire, you obviously don't care. I'm talking about everyone else.) Do you realize how much more DM-inspired casual sex could be going down? You're cheating the condom industry, child alimony lawyers and sports blogs, Twitter. Get your act together.
Twitter, which is historically slow on the uptake, recently introduced photo-sharing and will now even let your friends see the photos that you've shared on your profile. Baby steps.
