Yesterday, there was a piece in Forbes that was waxing lyrical about new social network Pheed, which, thanks to some heavy celebrity sign-ups, is being pitched as “the new Twitter”.

Yeah, we’ve been here before. Many, many times. Of course Pheed isn’t the new Twitter. But, curious as I am, I signed up to take a look.

And then Pheed immediately auto-posted to my Twitter profile.

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Twitter’s had a torrid few months and continues to have problems with error rates and API calls, but that’s simply scratching the absolute tip of the bugs and issues iceberg.

Here are five big holes that Twitter needs to fill.

Staff

Twitter is clearly understaffed. The company is actively hiring – there are 39 vacancies at the time of writing – and that’s a good sign, but they really need to step it up.

The company has documented their void in engineering, but of equal concern is the size of their support team. @Delbius et al do the best they can, but more often than not support enquiries still get little more than an auto-responded list of frequently asked questions and a rapidly-closed ticket.

I’m not sure exactly how many of their 241 current employees work in support, but I do know that only three of the 39 vacancies are in this area. In both cases, it isn’t enough – only 11% of my readers rate Twitter’s support as good to excellent. A whopping 79% rate it as below average to terrible.

Better Privacy Solutions

As I’ve documented on various occasions on this blog, Twitter’s block is not actually a block at all. The only way to get true security on your updates is to make them private. There needs to be a middle ground.

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