More Twitter Ramblings
Whenever I spend some time thinking about why I don’t like something, I inevitably stumble upon some way it can work for me.
After my last post regarding Twitter, it occurred to me that I could enter the update feeds of friends into Gmail’s Web Clip bar.
This eliminates the interruptions that occur when the updates come to my phone. It also removes the hyper linear nature of it. I only see updates when I check my email. Then Gmail chooses one to show at random. It may be the newest… or it may be from days ago. There’s a bit of chance involved. A bit of chaos. When I see an update, I may have other context to put it in. Maybe from conversations with the person, posts on their blogs, or things other people have passed along. For me, this feels more natural. More human.
Which brings up a question… I wonder if Twitter users subscribe to people they weren’t previously acquainted with? Is the type of content Twitter’s structure encourages interesting without other external context to place it in?
Show post tags
2 comments…Rambling about Twitter
It feels like Twitter is really starting to make some headway. Which is awesome. It’s great to see a new twist (rather than simply new features) on the underlying concept of Blogging. I’m completely fascinated by it. And yet I don’t use it.
This can be attributed to a couple of reasons:
- I’m not a phone person. I don’t like talking on them. Nor do I like sending messages through them. This is a result of a rather fuzzy mix of disconnect (from the person you are communicating with), interruption (receiving of and fear of causing), and the generally piss poor state of interaction design in most (if not all) cell phones.
- I increasingly feel the desire to use technology as a means to possess any given moment generally detracts from it by a) removing ones self from that moment and/or b) decreasing the perceived need to reflect upon that moment.
- I know folks who are prone to bad Twitter manners – Such as sending and receiving in the midst of a face to face conversation. That’s not something I’d like to encourage through participation.
Clearly I’m a weirdo. Numbers 1 & 3 have nothing at all to do with the product. Number 2 is, at best, merely an esoteric starting point for a feature request.
They do have something in common though. They all revolve around the way I interact with people and my environment. That’s where the fascination comes from…
Twitter is disruptive. Using it (or choosing not to) forces a consideration of things social. To varying degrees you have to re-consider rules and assumptions.
Maybe they change… Maybe they don’t…
This is not unlike the early days of Blogging (or if you want to get all semi-useful semi-cheeky anti-fashion fashionable about it: Blogging 1.0). The re-considering that was caused then left us with little consensus. Instead we have a bunch of related yet often conflicting opinions.
I hope the same holds true for Twitter (and the sure to come offshoots, expansions, and copies). Having it figured out is boring. But the process of figuring out is infinitely interesting*.
* Not coincidentally, that’s also what Blogging is. Put your fingers in your ears when over defined labels like journaling, publishing, cataloging, scrapbooking, reporting, and so forth and so on try to tell you otherwise.
A good time to hold’em
Ev’s “knowing when to hold’em” post has some great observations about the pluses and minuses of selling your small company to a larger one.
A couple posts later he talks about smaller purchased companies forming a separate identity inside a larger company.
I like that people say they work “at Flickr,” rather than at Yahoo!, their actual employer. Blogger people do that to.
Biz Stone ran with the connection... and didn’t shy away from the negative influences that help create these identities.
When you are acquired, ignored, and desperate for more resources what do you do? You form a tribe, hang on to your identity, and rock the indie corporate vibe.
Which makes me think that the most important resource to consider when selling a small company is buy-in.
The really tricky part is that a company offering to buy you does not equate to buy-in.
Consultants run into this all the time. If you know any, I’m sure you’ve heard at least one story about about finishing jobs without reaching the potential everyone envisioned before starting.
Adaptive Path has often pushed that one of the first things UX consultants should do is find out who the true stakeholders are in a company and talk directly to them.
I think the same is true when it comes to selling. Get away from the business guy whose job it is to do the deal. Find out who has the ability to definitively say Yes or No on your project. Talk to them. Over and over. Set solid goals with them that can be measured. Then discuss what happens if those goals aren’t getting met.
Figuring those things out from the outside is hard work. It’s easy to decide they’re better left to later… but you have much more momentum while they’re trying to bring you in. Once inside, inertia is always towards the status quo. As a new acquisition, you are as far from status quo as it gets. If you can’t get real tangible buy-in before you are bought, it’s a very strong sign that you should continue to build on your own.
On Circuits and Design
Marshall McLuhan – Nov. 20th, 1964 – Symposium on Cybernetics and Society
“In moving from the neolithic age to the electronic age, we move from the mode of the wheel to the mode of the circuit, from the lineal single-plane organization of experience to the pattern of feedback and circuitry and involvement.
...
In the age of circuitry, the consequences of any action occur at the same time as the action. Thus we now experience a growing need to build the very consequences of our programs into the original design and to put the consumer into the production process. By awakening to the significance of electronic feedback, we have become intensely aware of the meaning and effects of our actions after centuries of comparative heedlessness and non-involvement.”
Defensive Design in the Kitchen
Our apartment came with an Breville Fresco cordless electric kettle. I’ve never used one before. It’s really nice. It boils water very fast (significantly faster than the electric stove) and keeps it warm for a good long time. It also has a nice little design touch…
There is a large power switch at the top of the handle. You press it down the handle to turn it on – Up the handle to turn it off. ...Nothing fancy there.
Here’s where it gets good. There’s also another switch on the underside of the handle. When the kettle is on, it pops out a bit. Lifting the kettle out of it’s base forces you to press the switch back in – Turning off the kettle in the process.
There’s no worry that it may be sitting there empty, heating up the plastic it’s made from. Which is the sort of thing you probably wouldn’t worry about anyway… until the first time you do it.
Google Reader Improvement!
The Reader folks added support for including a feed in a folder when you subscribe (along with a number of bug fixes).
We also snuck in a small feature with this release: when you subscribe to a feed, you’ll get an “Add to a folder…” drop-down. This way, you can move that feed to a folder right there and then, without having to go to the settings screen.
As you can see, they placed the folder selection drop down in the subscribed status message. ...Which is much simpler (and better) than my go at it. Nice work.
Making MOO MiniCards
Jason’s Goldman’s post on MOO Flickr MiniCards reminded me that I wanted to get some for handing out when I met new folks here in NZ.
Making the cards is very easy. You pick your photos, then position them within a cropping outline. It’s low weight creativity. And a lot of fun.
There are a number of nice interaction touches throughout the process. There’s an attention to detail I very much enjoy. My favorite was the text length indicators when filling out the information for the back of your card.
See those green bars under each text box? They dynamically increase in size as you get closer to the character limit. It’s possible I only know what they mean because I already know that text boxes can have limits… It’s also possible that it’s easily ignored until the limit is reached, at which point there is enough information to quickly understand what is happening. Regardless, I love the idea.
Things weren’t entirely smooth though. When submitting the order form, I was greeted with this confounding fellow:
I have no idea what “Error:-25, Bad checksum” means. There wasn’t anything else on the form to help me figure it out. My heart momentarily sank. What if the site was busted and all my work picking and cropping images was lost? I asked myself if the cards were worth doing it all over again. The quick answer was “No”.
Luckily, I entered the same information again and it worked. My guess would be I had a typo in my credit card number (I do that a lot) and it failed the initial check to see if the number was valid.
If the error had said as much, I probably would have muttered something to myself about number’s being a cruel mistress and then forgotten all about it. Instead, I had a fun and rewarding experience quickly changed into anxiety.
It wasn’t a big deal in the end. I can’t wait to see my cards and I’d highly recommend Moo to anyone that has a decent collection of Flickr photos. But it does serve as a reminder of the importance of paying as much attention to the details that happen infrequently as those that happen regularly.
Previous page
Next pageLoveplum is a blog covering the many aspects of user experience. It is written by Jason Sutter.
