Comments on: A D- For Twitter Interface Design

By: Alan Levine aka CogDog

Alan Levine aka CogDog — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 15:00:26 +0000

Allison - I would not fault a simple format. Simple can be good, elegant, the opposite end of MS Word Bloat Where It Take 8 Menu Steps To Format a Tab. And I doubt its a shortage of tech knowhow, any ptrogramming language has built in sort routines.

It was suggested by Brian in a comment on an earlier post that it had more to do with a strategy to prevent a few snarky indivIduals who were gaming the sort routine to get their twitter names atop people’s lists (like the old phonebooks with companies like “AAAAardvark Used Car Sales”).

That’s hardly defensible IMHO. The user interface, experience must be the top priority.

But what do I know?

By: Allison Miller

Allison Miller — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 09:21:59 +0000

I too don’t really understand why Obvious.com leave Twitter as such a simple format.

Although there are lots of other really great Twitter sites to ‘compensate’, you’d think that Obvious.com would like to provide a better service to their customers.

Is it because Obvious.com run Twitter on a shoe-string budget - since there’s no advertising on the Twitter site to afford the luxury of ‘re-programming’ anything?

A similar issue is with the way your ‘Following’ cloud of picture / icons is arranged. Is this random order? And does this random order continuely change?

Allison Miller
Adelaide, Australia
Twitter: theother66

By: Sue Waters

Sue Waters — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 06:30:32 +0000

So totally agree. How hard is it really to fix it! Snitter is great and does solve this problem to some extent. However are you aware in the web interface if you type the first letter, when you can’t remember the name, and keep typing that letter it will take you through all the people whose names start with that letter and you stop when you get to the right name. Sorry not a great solution but better than trying to read all the names.

By: jokay

jokay — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 18:53:02 +0000

Go CogDog… tell it like it is!

I wholeheartedly agree.. random order sucks! And it annoys me that i have to find some other 3rd party tool like Snitter or whatever to compensate for something which is basic UI design.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:05:08 +0000

I use snitter in part because the interface is so great. If you’re not familiar with snitter it uses Adobe AIR (which I understand has memory leaks). Even with occasional issues that I blame on snitter (whether correct or not), I still stick with it, because it’s sooooo much better than the web interface.

By: Alan Levine aka CogDog

Alan Levine aka CogDog — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 15:59:52 +0000

Thanks Chris, actually I did not know that; shortcuts are handy, but….

What if I know there is someone among my XXX I follow that I cannot remember their twitter name exactly? I know it begins with chris_____ how the heck do I find it among my list? Do I have to search for everything? The list of followers is **useless** in an random ordered display.

By: Chris Craft

Chris Craft — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 15:47:59 +0000

This is a bit silly of me, but you do know that you can just type

d cogdog Hello this is a direct message

into the update box, right? Then you send a direct message as long as you know the username. This works from IM as well.

There are a few other commands like

stats

Which give you info you already know.

Chris