How to make Twitter's favourites more useful
Something I wrote for macgasm.net, that’s been bugging me for a while. The solution works nicely, I recommend checking it out.
How many times have you been to a product website and seen big bold letters proclaiming that you can CONNECT and ENGAGE and DISCOVER? Every time I see that, I hit the back button, and I bet you do too.
It’s because it’s vague. It’s supposed to sound exciting, but it’s not. It doesn’t say anything about what you can really do with the app.
Nobody wants to connect or discover.
Brent Simmons on Twitter’s new nomenclature. Spot-on.
I absolutely agree with Brent Simmons’s statement. Having read the articles by Cody Fink and John Gruber, I believe that—at least for me—Twitter’s apps (including the web app) have finally jumped the shark.
The new Twitter iPhone app seems to be aimed at new users and “casual users”. Now, why did I use this word, almost devoid of meaning, “casual users”?
I don’t think “casual users” are those who sometimes check Twitter to see what’s up; from personal experience those users are more likely to interact with a small amount of friends/other users, meaning that the most important features of Twitter are the timeline, conversations and direct messages. DMs, for one, are hidden in the last tab of the app. From Gruber’s article:
“Me”. Oh boy. Stashed into this tab are your profile, your direct messages, your Twitter Lists, and the interface for switching to other Twitter accounts. This tab is the conceptual carpet under which Twitter swept everything that didn’t fit under “Home”, “Connect”, or “Discover”.
And that’s exactly what happened.
As I see it, Twitter is trying to hone-in on new users and what it thinks are “casual users”; users who sometimes check Twitter to stay up to date on the latest happenings, trends and product offers and interact publicly with their friends and acquaintances.
Again, Gruber:
Presumably, this Discover tab is the successor to the late and unlamented dickbar — where sponsors will be able to pay Twitter to promote products and services.
Yup. Combine that with what Fink found out about this tab:
Discover is supposed to get better over time. Depending on where you’re located, who you follow, or what topics you find interest in, Discover aims to offer suggestions around those things.
Until now Twitter’s applications allowed the users to make use of the service according to his/her needs, even the web app. Now Twitter is trying to steer users in a direction.
For me this direction is called “We finally need a way to monetize this service.”, which Twitter perfectly entitled to do.
Unfortunately that means many users will now (have to) steer clear of Twitter’s applications. Thankfully there are alternatives; Twitterrific and Twittelator Neue cater to what I think are causal users; as they integrate DMs and @-replys and photos nicely into the timeline and create a seamless experience.
On the other end of the spectrum there’s Echofon and Tweetbot; two clients help the user make the most of almost everything Twitter has to offer and give him/her quick access to almost any kind of information.
I have found what I was looking for in Tweetbot. Tweetie and Tweetie 2.0 even more so, were the evolution of Twitter on the iPhone; the first clients that were more powerful than the website. Everything Twitter did to it after buying it, was adding features and altering it. Tweetbot has everything I loved in Tweetie 2.0, but with even more useful features, all packaged in a design that makes everything very accessible and a pleasure to use.
David Chartier on Shit work and technocentrism
Zach Holman:
The problem with shit work is that no one likes doing it, but an awful lot of people say they do.
I disagree with almost everything in this piece. It’s based entirely on one core assumption that is wrong in so many ways, I told Siri to set a timer for how long I can take to respond to this.
Holman hates managing Twitter lists, Google+ circles, email folders, and task priorities, and leans on a couple anecdotes and process-alergic indie contractor Merlin Mann to argue that no one actually gets any value out of doing these things. That’s fine for the people who don’t really get these things, or those who don’t work in an environment where they are ever necessary. But a lot of people do get value from these processes in a variety of ways, from simple entertainment, to maintaining privacy while sharing online (which Holman shrugs off), to staying on top of crazy work schedules and informed on current events. Aside from the inevitable edge case examples, developers aren’t spending all this time on features no one asked for.
One of Holman’s punching bags is Twitter lists. He doesn’t like them, doesn’t see the point, and doesn’t know anyone who thinks otherwise. I love and increasingly use Twitter lists, and I personally know a bunch of people who do as well. Stepping beyond my single anecdote, though, you don’t have to spend much time to find plenty of others who do as well. I also found great Twitter clients that do good things with lists and make them easy to use, and isn’t that half the challenge almost any work imaginable? If your tools suck, doing the work will likely suck.
I don’t need to trudge through every one of Holman’s “shit work” examples for you to get the picture. Just because you or like Merlin Mann doesn’t get or like a process doesn’t mean there’s no value in it, or that it’s “shit work.” Plus, leaning on a couple anecdotes to judge the big picture is just plain lazy. Writing these processes off because you don’t get them or don’t work in an environment where they can be useful is arrogant and ethnocentric.
I read the post by Mr. Holman and I came to a similar conclusion. If Mr. Holman doesn’t like those tools, fine, but writing them off because of it, is self-centered punditry that we can do without.
It’s black-and-white thinking of the highest (lowest?) order: “If a tools isn’t perfect from the get-go, the way I want it, it is shit altogether and nobody should even try to make it useful for them!”
To be clear: I don’t cherish the fact that I sometimes have to sit down and sort people into Twitter or Facebook lists. But the 15 minutes I spend doing this increase the value of both tools immensly for me. Same goes for RSS feeds; fairly regularly I weed through them, checking which ones are still worth reading and which aren’t.
Here are two examples:
- Twitter lists: While I don’t follow many people, I have a few key lists set-up. One of those is a list of friends and people whose opinion I value. Using this list in Tweetbot, I can quickly catch-up on recent happenings and discussions when I don’t want to go through 10 hours of my timeline.
Mr. Holman might object by saying that this isn’t the way to use Twitter. Who in their right mind will spend time reading tweets so far back? Well, I sometimes do. - Facebook’s new subscription feature: This is one of the most welcome additions to the service for me so far, because it allows me to select whose updates appear in my timeline. There’s a number of people I am friends with on Facebook, that I simply keep there to have a means of getting into contact without giving them my email address, but I don’t need to see every update of.
Look at the last sentence of the blurb.
BWAHAHAHAHA.
#blocked
It’s funny because it’s true. Sad, too.
A break from Twitter
For almost two years now I’ve been using Twitter.
As soon as I switched on my Mac, a Twitter client was activated; on my iPhone Twitterrific was a fixture on my first screen.
This service is many things to me;
- a means of reading stuff by interesting people
- a tool to connect to friends, people and companies
- a means of telling people what I think
At every moment of using this service I’ve been aware that it is essentially screaming into a large valley atop a hill, hoping someone will hear me, but it was fun.
Recently though, it has become a distraction to what I have to do; study.
So now I scream into this seemingly empty void:
For the following months I’m not going to be on Twitter very often, or Facebook for that matter. I’m going to keep writing on my blog, should I see something I want to share and I’m going to continue reading the sites of — and interacting with — those interesting people and friends.
