Twitter outlines their near future plans in a blog post. This struck me:

For instance, we’re experimenting with better ways to give you what you come to Twitter for: a snapshot of what’s happening. We can use information like who you follow and what you engage with to surface highlights of what you missed and show those to you as soon as you log back in or come back to the app.

A catch up feature, which I doubt I’d use but assuming it’s not obtrusive, I’d at least not hate it. Problem is, every time Twitter has fiddled with giving its users more relevant or useful tweets in the timeline, they fuck it up. Getting people you follow’s favorites springs to mind.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, because direct messages are getting some love.

We have several updates coming that will make it easy to take a public conversation private. The first of these was announced today and will begin rolling out next week: the ability to share and discuss Tweets natively and privately via Direct Messages.

I’m not holding my breath for Twitter to fix DMs, they make money on the public tweets, but hopefully they realize that they’ve given away a former prime spot in the IM race by not developing DMs properly.

Twitter’s a weird beast, with 500 million popping by just to read on a daily basis. That’s an impressive number, but given the “strategy statement” that’s making the rounds online now, to much ridicule, I doubt they really know what to do with all this. Except sell ads, there’ll always be ads.

Reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting everyone to their world via our information sharing and distribution platform products and be one of the top revenue generating Internet companies in the world.

Seriously, world is in there thrice, and the whole statement doesn’t fit in a tweet. That feels off for a company limiting conversation to 140 characters.