The smallest improvements to online services are greatly appreciated.  Sometimes I get so comfortable with the current functionality of a tool that I fear the new improvements or versions will turn me away.  I’ve seen Adobe reinvent their interface with each new version of their design suite in good and bad ways and WordPress revamped their service successfully in its most recent update.

Just this week, Gmail updated how labels are used, allowing you to drag messages into labels like folders.  Calling them labels might be confusing, but it is a great functionality.  You can also choose to show or hide the labels/folders most useful to your needs.  I use labels/folders all the time and GMail has in some sense become a To-Do list and a file cabinet for all my stuff.  If I want to remember something I send an email to myself (I’d love a note taking feature in GMail).  I fear that one day GMail will transform itself into something like Yahoo or HotMail with obnoxious photo advertisements.

Twitter also improved the functionality of its follow lists.  It allows you to view the last status update of all your followers and make changes easier. It’s an improvement and allows me to see who is no longer posting (Twitterfade).   I would like to see the follower list in more of a DataGrid type format (so I can view a long list of followers, last update, and date of last update).  Also, would be nice to see which of your followers you are following.

Twitter could also benefit from an easier way to make conversations without your replies going into your main feed.   I’m sure you can filter and weed out stuff using a third-party tool, but if Twitter wants to grow, it needs to work better at providing more functionality to its users.