8 things Twitter needs to do to improve service

I’ve been using Twitter for a year as of yesterday. I like the microblogging service for finding interesting weblinks and to offer my two-bits on pop culture, customer service and other things. I also use it to promote my stories at Investors.com and my blog posts on Tech-media-tainment. To date, I’ve posted 967 tweets, many of them retweets of other people’s posts.
It’s a fun service. But honestly if it disappeared tomorrow, I’d just shrug and go on with my life.
That said, here are eight things Twitter needs to do to improve its service:

1. No more fail whales. Twitter needs to improve its system performance and stop the frequent messages about being over capacity.

2. Improve search. I’d like to be able to refine searches, such as searching my own posts or someone else’s or searching by date or location, etc.

3. Fix the funny coding in searches where an apostrophe shows up as a bunch of weird characters.

4. Offer the ability to see what people in any town or zip code are tweeting about, not just trending topics by country or large metropolitan area.

5. Add the ability to retweet from Lists of Twitter users.

6. Fix the “Add your location” feature. It stopped working for me and I can’t add my location any more. I get the error message: “Unable to contact Twitter location service. Try again.”

7. In the Retweets section, Retweets by You hasn’t been working much lately. Fix it.

8. Provide a “mark as read” feature so you only see new posts. I currently use the Favorites star as a bookmark on my main feed and lists. But whatever you do, don’t take away that Favorites star. I’d be lost without it.