I know Twitter these days can feel like an endless litany of commentary on the actions (and omissions) of the US president and the whirlwind of social discord that swirls in his wake as chaotically as his signature hairstyle. And I’m fully aware that the internet already has a surplus of methods and applications for sending messages between people. But still, I keep faith with Twitter, and I do believe there’s room for it to expand its usefulness beyond the purposes it currently serves.

So why do I want yet another messaging app? The answer is the most essential thing to any messaging app: the contacts it contains. I reinstalled WhatsApp this week after previously deleting my account when it started feeding phone numbers into Facebook’s voracious data-collecting monster — but the thing I realized was that my best and most curated contact list exists on Twitter. WhatsApp consumed all of the work and personal contacts on my phone and served me with all the hundreds of people I’ve interacted with. When I look at my Twitter Direct Messages, I see only the people I want to converse with.

I use Telegram for most of my personal messaging, and I’ve been reasonably successful in recruiting others to install and use it too. Telegram is my app for the close circle of friends of whom I can demand the installation of a new app. It’s pretty great, working quickly and very reliably, and it keeps all my conversations perfectly synced across dozens of phones, a couple of tablets, and every laptop and desktop I have (via a web interface). I only added WhatsApp because I decided that it could help me have an informal means of communication with more people, even if they’re not close personal friends. And that’s when my Twitter epiphany arose.

I interact with a lot of readers through Twitter. If you ask me for headphone advice, I’m liable to DM you a comprehensive answer. Whether you choose to sing my praises or point out an error in my writing, I’ll DM you my thanks. And if you criticize me in some valid or creatively derisive way, I’m guaranteed to respond via DM. Tweets are fine for declaring something grandiose and impersonal to the entire world, but I find them inchoate for communication with any particular human. That’s why I, perhaps more than most, rely on Twitter’s messaging system to exchange thoughts and ideas with others. Arguing in public on Twitter is something I’d rather leave to celebrities, people who are better accustomed to publicizing their conversations.

I’m not in search of a clean-slate messenger that would have a revolutionary interface or do something shockingly different — I just want a good way to interact with my Twitter contacts. The current DM system inside Twitter is anything but good. It’s fiddly and slow to find the person I want to ping, and if you’ve ever tried to compose a longer message in Twitter’s mobile apps, you’ll know how tiny and obtusely hostile the composition box is.

It seems obvious to me that Twitter’s Direct Messages system is designed by a company that doesn’t want you spending too much time sending Direct Messages.

Given Twitter’s reliance on the ephemeral metric of “engagement,” I can see why the company would choose to funnel its users toward making every interaction public via tweets. But that’s not really the way most people use its platform. A lot of casual users, for example, nowadays treat Twitter as the first port of call for customer support issues, pinging plaintive missives in the direction of big chain stores and service suppliers. I know of more than one tech company that now has a dedicated team of customer care officers working exclusively through Twitter. Well, all those conversations can be carried out much more discreetly and usefully in a DM exchange. No more character limits constraining a full troubleshooting explanation, and no conflation between the customer’s general feed and a support chat.

Twitter occupies a somewhat unique position on the spectrum between private and public messaging. I use it to have great conversations with people who are mostly strangers, yet I don’t really think those chats would be as good if they were public, where both of us would be conscious of an additional audience. Over time, what I’ve discovered is that those DM exchanges have organically developed a contact list that I can best describe as “cool acquaintances.” I want to be able to pull that group out of Twitter — because, perhaps, seeing a constant stream of twisted screams about the bad state of the world might not be so great for my mental health — and chat with them in the same modern way that I can with friends on Telegram.

Unlike my colleague Casey Newton, who is tireless in his campaign to get Twitter to offer the option to edit tweets, I entertain no illusions that my desired feature would be implemented. I’ve learned to keep my expectations of Twitter Inc. low, following a spate of failures to address chronic problems of abuse. But even so, a dedicated Twitter DM app would be something I’d use the hell out of, and I imagine many others would find useful as well.