New Features Twitter Needs to Compete

> Is Twitter getting alarmingly stale?

I'd say yes.

I agree especially with this point:

>The ability to have private or semi-private group conversations.

Or just some kind of grouping functionality for the people you follow, like Facebook's ability to create friend groupings that only you see.

Also some kind of batching would be nice, the way Friendfeed does with Twitter posts. No way I'd follow someone high volume like Scoble or Dave Winer (or a zillion other people who can fill up your stream) within the actual Twitter app when I can get these batches on FF.

Re: Tagging: I noticed some people have started tagging posts with # before words. I think they could implement that special character to work similarly to how the @ character works.