Twitter's UX: Separate the hits from the geekhacks

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2618-twitters-ux-separate-the-hits-from-the-geekhacks

by andrewtbham • 16 years ago

35 17 16 years ago

al_james2• 16 years ago

Saying "Streams are built out of subscriptions ('following'), not 'friendship'" is something twitter got right over facebook is totally missing the point. Facebook is about real (meat-space) friends, not random geeky egomaniacs like on twitter. Apples to oranges.

derefr• 16 years ago

But a subscription is a simpler building block, that allows for a wider variety of relationships. With Facebook, every relation must be symmetric; with Twitter, relations are symmetric by choice; you can have friends (you add them, and they add you), but also fans, without having to extend the feature set or invent new terms. Facebook, on the other hand, had to create Fan pages, because they didn't have a preexisting verb that users could overload to do the same thing.

binspace• 16 years ago

True, but they are still different use cases. For example, Facebook friends seem to respond more to my posts than my Twitter followers.

Twitter seems cold and impersonal. Facebook has my friends on it so it's warm and fuzzy.

al_james2• 16 years ago

If facebook had used the verb 'follow' or 'subscribe' to friends, it would be nowhere the size it is now. People would not get it.

dfj225• 16 years ago

I agree with the main point here. I'd like Twitter more (and find it more usable) if all the context/meta information (links, hashtags, references to other users--@replies, etc) were separated from the content itself. 140 characters is not a lot and they are frequently wasted on giving context instead of original thought/message content.

armandososa• 16 years ago

This is the comment I left in that post:

Why? We geeks gave twitter it's success. We stayed faithful to them even when better alternatives (pownce, jaiku, plurk?) appeared. We endured the fail whales. We forgave the lack of features and we built apps and invent smart hacks to compensate for it.

Now you are suggesting that Twitter should kick us out so the Justin Bieber's fan doesn't get annoyed?. Screw them! They'll fly to the next cool thing in a year or two anyway.

We'll stay if they treat us with respect.

points• 16 years ago

I think it depends on definition of 'geek'.

I doubt many hackers use twitter. It's for self promotion mainly, or consuming that promotion (Being a fan). Something I don't think most hackers are interested in.

danilocampos• 16 years ago

> I doubt many hackers use twitter. It's for self promotion mainly, or consuming that promotion (Being a fan). Something I don't think most hackers are interested in.

From the outside, I'm sure it looks that way. Twitter is definitely for self promotion if you're a musician or other celebrity.

If you're someone who builds things, though, Twitter is an always-on chat with other people who build things. If you want it to be. I've learned a lot from the many developers I follow on Twitter. Heck, my current day job is something I found through a relationship that began on Twitter.

It's what you make of it, but a boatload of truly productive people use Twitter to share information every day.

SabrinaDent• 16 years ago

It's for self promotion mainly, or consuming that promotion (Being a fan). Something I don't think most hackers are interested in.

That demonstrates a very shallow and cursory understanding of Twitter. It's also problematic for people in the hacking space; if you eschew channels like Twitter until you need to market your product, you will have no native intelligence in the ecosystem, you will gain no benefit or far less benefit than you might have, and you will not do as well by your product as you might have.

tompetty• 16 years ago

I'd guess a problem with having images or URLs not counting towards a character count is the myriad of different interfaces/apps twitter is used in. A lot are text only and it might become a real headache in terms of imparting the information concisely / in a rhythmic and uniform fashion

alanh2• 16 years ago

Right, let’s not forget SMS. Twitter launched TXT-heavy and is still used mostly that way in certain emerging markets.

adamhowell• 16 years ago

I don't usually quote pg, but I think in this case it's relevant:

"Old Twitter is what you'd get if an engineer brought New Twitter to Steve Jobs, and Steve beat on him relentlessly to simplify it."

(http://twitter.com/#!/paulg/status/25998745559)

To me adding a file upload button, a To:/CC: field, a link field, etc. etc. would be even worse.

The beauty of an API is that power users can download and/or signup for apps that add on to the original service in the exact, fussy way they want. And non-power users can just type into a textarea.

kyro2• 16 years ago

I noticed upon clicking that link that Twitter has broken my back button functionality. I get redirected to the Twitter home page, and subsequent clicking of the back button takes me back to pg's status.

patrickaljord• 16 years ago

That's a firefox bug.

semanticist• 16 years ago

If you click 'back' again before the Twitter home page loads, it behaves correctly. (That is, basically double-click 'back' from pg's tweet.)

I guess it's because Twitter is inserting things into your page history to make its AJAXy interface work with forward/back buttons. These things are a mixed bag of useful and fragile.

alanh2• 16 years ago

According to Doug Bowman’s reply to me, integrated URL shortening is (of course) a known pain point that they hope to resolve after taking care of bugs and nailing the implementation.

http://twitter.com/#!/stop/status/27695305433

Twitter's UX: Separate the hits from the geekhacks

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