Features I’d love to see in an ADN client

I’ve dipped my toes in to the waters of app.net (I’m @Konrad the­re) and must say that I quite enjoy the expe­ri­ence. Quite a bit of resourceful indi­vi­du­als also fre­quent that ven­ture, so the eco­sys­tem is coming along nicely—the num­ber of new cli­ents to try is incre­asing rapidly, and new things are being tried out. Exci­ting times.

Picking up from an old post of mine and put­ting into words a few ide­as I have been car­ry­ing around for a while now, I am going to start a list of fea­tures that I would love to see in an ADN cli­ent. I would­n’t mind if they also show­ed up in Twit­ter cli­ents, but I’m not so hop­eful that inno­va­ti­on will con­ti­nue in that space. 

• intel­li­gent user­na­me refe­ren­ces. I’d love to see if the @-notated links in mes­sa­ges indi­ca­ted whe­ther I alre­a­dy fol­low a user or not; this could so very easi­ly be achie­ved with color-coding the link, or giving them litt­le icons. 
• Make inter­ac­tions asyn­chro­no­us whe­re­ver that is pos­si­ble. I am not so par­ti­cu­lar­ly curious as to when the cli­ent stars a mes­sa­ge that I am loo­king at. I’d much rather it remem­bers my inten­ti­on to do so and tri­es until it suc­ceeds over report­ing back to me that it was curr­ent­ly impos­si­ble. To my tas­tes, it could just as well pre­tend that the star­ring has alre­a­dy hap­pen­ed even if it hasn’t—so color­code the stars when it’s just a local chan­ge queu­ed no be sent out. 
• Queu­es, lists, wha­te­ver: right now, I have two distinct uses of star­ring pos­tings. One is to let others know I par­ti­cu­lar­ly lik­ed some­thing, the other is a remin­der for me to look at some­thing again — goog­ling it, fol­lo­wing up to it, loo­king at a book refe­rence. I would so much like to be able to sepe­ra­te the two things; having the stars for the out­side com­mu­ni­ca­ti­on and some­thing like a flag for myself. 
• [Added Nov 15] Timestamps on when the post was writ­ten. I think it makes quite a bit of sen­se to know what the local time of day was for the aut­hor of the post and less for me, the rea­der. So having a way to see what time the aut­hor wro­te the post at would be quite grand.

I’m sure other things will come to mind even­tual­ly. And I am even more con­vin­ced other peo­p­le will come up with more inte­res­t­ing, more cle­ver and just bet­ter ide­as. But I just had to wri­te this up!