Around the time that a hundred followers became a big deal, the Twitter Following and Follower pages became almost grossly inadequate. As the pages are organize in reverse chronological order, that is your newest follower or account that you’re following appearing on top, navigating these pages meant either having to guess when you first encountered a specific account or flip through each page manually and scan icons. Such a process was arduous, to put it bluntly, when trying to send a direct message to infrequent users with obscure user names.

Now, for the first time since I can remember (and I’ve been on Twitter for nearly two and a half years now), Twitter has updated their Following/Followers pages. The new pages, seen below, allow users to have expanded follower lists, displaying each user’s last tweet, or in list form for quick scans. Both views have a button which expands into a menu featuring some convenient tasks – Reply (or ‘mention’ in the new Twitter parlance), Direct Message, Unfollow, and the ever-important Block function.

The Expanded Following View

The expanding menu is helpful in all but one regard – it drastically slows down the ability to prune your following list. Until this week, users could skim their Following pages and determine who was following back simply by looking for the option to message. No message option meant that the user was not following you back. True, users can now click one-by-one on each flyout menu to see if they are able to direct message, but the quick Monday morning parity sessions are likely a thing of the past. It would be nice to see the green Following Checks from the Followers pages make their way onto the Following pages. I guess in the mean time, users will have to rely on the various third party follower monitoring services for this.

The Followers List View

All in all, the new changes add some much needed functionality, but still fall short of where they need to be. With the ease in which Twitter users can find and follow, Twitter really does need an inter-account search function, so that users don’t have to flip through page after page of followers, even in the nice, new, compact List format.

But, now that 2008 – which somehow managed to fly by and feel incredibly long in retrospect – is leaving us, it’s time to look ahead to 2009. I’ve never been one to assign a false list of ideas or resolutions to a coming year, but I am finally settling into a solid working schedule, and so I can slowly tick of items from my mythical “To Do” list.

Here’s a peek at what’s to come:

Resources – I’ve slowly started to compile a list of resources for writers here on my website, things that writer’s often find themselves needing. These run the gamut from rules of thumb, quotes on the industry, articles that I’ve found, and a few pieces of compiled works.

One such work – a list of word count page estimates – is already online in bare bones form. The second major undertaking is a Writer’s Dictionary, a compilation of words and acronyms used to describe, critique, and sell writing.

Links and Reads – Instead of offering up a blog roll, I have instead chosen to include my daily reads on a separate, static page. This helps give the links better oomph in Google, and for the SEO fans out there, allows me to link to sites I read with keywords. Recently, I’ve found about a dozen or blogs that I ported into Google Reader and need to thus include in that page. My reading list tends to stick with industry-related blogs, dealing with general and copy writing, but also the business end – that of the lit agents and editors. It’s by no means complete or authoritative, but it’s growing daily.

In black, of course

Video – For Christmas I received that which I really wanted (at Kelly’s suggestions) – a Flip Mino HD. I also secured a tripod (also at Kelly’s suggestion), and with the help of Kino (an FOSS video editing solution), I plan to start doing short video pieces on a regular basis.

I am currently leaning towards Vimeo for video hosting, but I’m also considering Seesmic and will probably play around with both. If anyone has any suggestions (other than the YouTube), or preferences, I am open to hearing them.