We went for lunch with eBay recently which also involved a tour of their secret London office. I say secret as eBay don’t publish where their office is and the building has no external signage whatsoever. Apparently this is because they once put the address on the website but were inundated with people showing up with broken teapots (etc.) and demanding refunds!

Inside I discovered that the offices of online companies really are like the Googleplex. The walls and floors were painted in primary colours and there were things like electric guitars and basketballs all over the place. All the meeting rooms have beanbags instead of chairs, and they are cheesily named after British “icons” (stereotypes) such as “Concorde” and “Buckingham Palace”.

If this wasn’t patronising enough I also noticed that above each employees desk there was a small whiteboard, onto which said employee was required to make write their name and make a small drawing of themselves.

I’ve been using Twitter for about a week now. Obviously the service is still very young and has a long way to come, but here are a few features I’d like to see:

Activities and Localities

Ever since I was a kid I’ve been fascinated by the idea that there are 6 billion other people in the world all doing similar things at the same time; and I’ve always wanted to know the exact numbers. How many people are eating hot dogs in India at the same time? How many people are reading War and Peace in Chile at the same time? Or, to steal a scene from Amelie, how many people are having sex in Paris at the same time?

This is something that could be explored through Twitter if it had pre-defined Activities (eating, sleeping, sexing) and Localities (London, Paris, Shanghai) With Twitter’s mobile integration it should be easy to track latitude/longitude when updates are sent. Pipe this into Google Maps and suddenly you have access to the global conciousness.

Downloading

I really like the idea of Twitter as a record of things I’ve seen and done. Even over the space of a week its fun to look back and see what I was up to last Wednesday. Twitter already has an archive page but there seems to be no way to take your data off of the site (except for the RSS feed that only includes recent updates). Looking at their Terms of Service the Twitter guys seem pretty clued up on data ownership, so hopefully its just a matter of time…

Spam prevention

Just like email, blog comments, and myspace friends before it, I’m sure its just a matter of time before Twitter falls victim to spammers. Already I have attracted some odd “followers” who I don’t know at all. These people seem to crawl the Twitter network adding everyone as friend - I’m sure there’s some dubious motive involved.

Better notification controls

Unpopular as I am with only three friends on Twitter, my phone still annoyingly beeps away all day long with SMS updates turned on; and I can’t imagine what it must be like for uber-socialites like Frances. It would be great to be able to set notifications on a per friend level and even set schedules for their updates.

For example I might want to receive phone updates from my girlfriend all the time, updates from colleagues only during work hours and updates from friends at the weekend.

A new year, a new beginning. One of my many resolutions this year is to finally stop lurking, make a website that I update regularly, and get involved with the blossoming web 2.0.

Its ridiculous that I have been designing for and using the internet for eight years, yet the only traces of my existance online are a hotmail profile and a freelance portfolio that hasn’t been updated for two years.

So from this day forth I’m going to start blogging, digging, flickring and twittering with the best of them.

I hope to share my ideas and discoveries in everything I do; be it designing, coding and photographing, or growing a business, owning a house for the first time and travelling the world. I hope you’ll join me…