But will Twitter check out the hook when my DJ revolves it?

So basically, my problem is this: for people like me, who still pay attention to individual new Twitter followers, it’s very difficult to tell at a glance from the ‘new follower email notification’ whether or not I should consider following-back straight away. I might stop email notification of new followers if I start picking them up at a rate of knots, but at the moment I can still cope with the flow.

Here’s my suggestion: When Twitter sends you an email saying you’ve got a new follower, how about including that person’s location, web address and bio (which most people fill out unless they’re trying to be terribly mysterious) and their last three tweets to give a flavour of what they’re like — essentially an overview that will save me from having to click through to decide whether or not to follow them back.

Following on from that – how about a link from within the email that allows one to follow or block that user straight from within the email? This might be overkill for some, but seriously, the less clicking through I need to do to manage my online life, the better.

Of course, this is based on the assumption that Twitter is never going to overhaul its web-based friend/follower management tools. Personally, I’m familiar enough with Gmail and its heavenly keyboard shortcuts to make pretty short shrift of tackling my inbox. It’s why I choose email notification for the sort of thing that makes visiting Twitter’s site a PITA.

If Twitter’s web-based tools were smoother and more shortcut-friendly, with a more thoughtful approach to the interface design, I would probably prefer managing it all online. Unless of course some genius comes up with the perfect Twitter client for OS X – i.e. TweetDeck’s group feature + Tweetie’s conversation breadcrumb feature + Twitterific’s keyboard shortcut integration + support for location updates, TwitPic posts, and all the other beautiful API goodness all rolled into one amazing piece of software that I won’t ever ever ever want to leave or quit or change up from ever ever ever EVER.

That is, until the next big thing comes along.

Update: Thanks to Andy Price for actually submitting these ramblings as a bona fide feature request – *that’s* the way to get things done. :-)