In Conversation with the Author
Just to warn you, this is a twitter post. Even worse, it’s a twitter is great because… post. So you’ve been warned okay.
A couple of times recently I’ve commented on a book I’ve been reading on twitter and mentioned the author in my post. Both times the author has promptly replied in a very genuine way. Twitter enables that sort of instant gratification dialog with someone who you wouldn’t normally get a chance to interact with. It succeeds because there is no obligation or onus on the recipient of an @ message to respond.
The first time this happened was with Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) when I commented that I was a bit disappointed with his book that it didn’t really cater for the more knowledgeable audience and was a bit basic for me. His response and his disappointment that I hadn’t enjoyed it was really heartfelt.
The second time this happened was just yesterday when I received a reply from Tom Chatfield (@tomchatfield). I’d just received his book, Fun Inc.; Why games are the 21st century’s most serious business. I mentioned that I hoped the book goes beyond the usual games are important anecdotes, facts and figures that are generally rolled out on this topic. His reply was simple and to the point. “you and me both”.
I don’t think this sort of dialog would have been possible in the past without significant investment of time and effort on both sides.
The Problem with Blackout IRE
is that it’s starting to affect the usability of twitter.
Here we have three different friends; @cufa, @eamonleonard, @eirepreneur all using the same avatar. The instict when scanning twitter feeds is to assume that tweets from the same avatar are from the same person. Of course that’s not true when we’re supporting causes by using the same avatar, with some exceptions (@uberalex and @davidcoallier)…
The trends of supporting causes witha modified image are far more successful in my opinion. Santa Hats were the yuletide flavour, and now red noses are popping up. BBC employees @wossy and @stephenfry are leading the way…
User Twesting
Those clever folks at ASOS are at it again. It’s little wonder that everyone in the online fashion retail space is looking to them for innovation.
I noticed this message pop into my twitter stream…
A little investigation found the original question…
And some of the replies…
It’s not a formal card sorting by any means, but if you want some quick & dirty user feedback it’s a great idea.
The Cost of Twitter
I work in an office for a fairly large company, and unsurprisingly we have a mailing list for our department (interactive media). This is used for making announcements and also sharing information more informally such as news or humorous links gleaned from the information superhighway.
I’ve increasingly noticed how the latter is not very informative for me since most of the time I’ve already seen whatever it is being shared usually because someone (often more than one) I follow has twittered it. When somebody sent round a link to the Onion’s parody on a new Macbook launch I made the (tongue in cheek) comment that it was like soooo 8 hours ago.
But it reminded me of a blog post by one of my favourite bloggers, Seth Godin:
The closer you get to the source and moment of information, the more it costs.
If you wanted to be the first person to see Nokia’s new phone, you could have flown to Berlin, as Robert Scoble did. Or you could have been the second person by obsessively hitting refresh on his posts. Or you could have been the tenth person by having it show up in your feed later in the day. Or you could wait a week and see it everywhere. Or in a year, get one on eBay for $5…
Sure, go ahead, stay hyper-current, but realize it’s not free.
I think I’ve gained a lot by being ahead of the information curve, possibly because there are lots of people in the company not trying to be, so that current knowledge is a resource to a certain extent. But if everyone is trying to be close to now does it simply become an informational arms race with spiraling costs?
Why Facebook Couldn’t Kill Twitter Overnight
A couple of posts on the topic of twitter vs + < / > (not sure what the correct relationship is) facebook popped up today.
Niall discusses the mutual benefits of engagement in both
Meanwhile AllFacebook has taken a break from discussing Jordan and Lily Allen and suggested that Facebook could kill twitter overnight.
Their proposal is essentially to make statuses public. Apparently this would save Facebook $500m in the stock options that were allegedly offered to buy twitter (though I also heard this was at a year old hyped valuation). They also go to length to point out that the facebook 5000 friend limit would not be a big hindrance since there are only around 500 twitter users with that many friends (ignoring the possibility that the number might grow as twitter gets bigger and becomes more mainstream).
What they also ignore is the fact that twitter and facebook are fundamentally different in how they understand the concept of friends. Facebook has never aimed to be a publishing platform and interprets the concept of friend as someone you know. Genuinely know, interact with, would recognise if you saw walking down the street etc. Twitter lets anyone follow anyone else which is what makes it a fantastic way to source news.
That’s not to say that Facebook and Twitter could not learn a lot from each other. Facebook could certainly take a lesson from how Twitter has used open APIs to essentially outsource development of tools, and there is huge room for statuses to become more than they are today (adding commenting was a big, if initially unpopular, step in that direction). Twitter could learn a lot from how Facebook manages identity (I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Facebook Connect implementation though at some point in the future) for both people and brands to live in harmony.
Overlay Off
I asked a question on twitter earlier today.
I received some interesting replies which I thought I might collate and share.
I found it interesting to see how much people disliked the overlay effect which is becoming increasingly popular due to sites like facebook popularising lightboxes. This is essentially websites, and RIAs in particular going back to the bad ol’ days of desktop application design. In such archaeic times dialog boxes which prevented the user from doing any other action until the dialog has been dismissed were common. Alas they’re still relatively common for some types of applications in some operating systems (not naming names of course).
I had believed that in certain process or stepped tasks the overlay or the lightbox was a useful tool which focuses the attention and restricts the user to more limited courses of action which is useful for keeping a process in line. But I would think again having seen some of these reactions. Has anybody experience of doing user testing with these sorts of interfaces.