There’s a lot being made this weekend at SxSW about so called twitter saturation making communication all but impossible. But really, it’s not so bad, twitter is being widely used because it fills a critical need at events like this, and user behavior can and has adapted to make this additional information more useful.
As more people have come online, people have changed how they are using the service. Twitter as a company has done a great job of building a stable, easy to use service. As it grows, they can make the shift to the next level simpler by making some features available to offer a more seamless experience in two specific areas.
Follower Relevance: As more people have come online users have started getting more discriminating about who they follow. We can only consume so much information and twitter should offer tools to make it easier to prune the list of those users follow simpler. Ideally, they should provide a way to measure the relevance of those we follow. I have seen a few recommendation engines for followers, but it hasn’t been done well yet.
Search: I have been searching for sxsw and specific other keywords to find out what is going on related to whatever I’m interested in right now. As Daniel Terdiman notes, this isn’t easy to do on mobile. Twitter needs a better mobile app, Twitterberry works alright for my blackberry but there’s a lot more that could be included and Twitter as a company should get in this game.
That said, Twitter has held up very well and continues to be widely used because it is a useful service. The mass communication taking place on twitter at events like SXSW shows that twitter it does a better job of meeting the need for communication than anything which previously existed. And the need for methods of dealing with the saturation will be met by new services and features.