Twitter's missing manual
eev.ee
eev.ee
If you make 10 screenshots of tweets that illustrate the various things you need to know, with a brief one-paragraph explanation for each, that might do the trick.
People don't really want to know how the thing works. They really want to know how it's typically used, so they can make tweets that blend in and make it seems like they know what they're doing.
(And yes, it's pretty hard to figure out how to actually use Twitter correctly.)
I've bookmarked this, and will definitely refer to it next time I try to do anything with twitter.
One exception: I don't think the self-reply trick is well known, but it's useful in the very common case of splitting a message across multiple tweets. I suppose 10K extended messages will obviate it, if they ever actually show up...
Any meaningful change will be so jarring that the dyed in the wool users will balk at it, kicking up a storm of protests and it will not serve to bring in new users (they come in not for good UI but for the network effect - but they don't use it and leave because of the UI).
I honestly can't believe how insanely horrible twitter UI is - and it seems to be something that all twitter users have agreed to never mention. It just leaves one breathless after it opens the FOURTH modal window on top of the previous three that it had already opened.
On the bright side of things, for anyone teaching UI, twitter is a fantastic example of what NOT to do.
I've said all this but either is INIFNITELY better than twitter, especially twitter's standard web client. TweetDeck makes the thing barely useable.
I'm fairly technically proficient and I have a hard time figuring out how to "onboard" myself to Reddit and to understand the whole system. It's relatively intimidating.
If we want to stick to text-only, I think HN is actually a better example. Of course, Facebook is really the pinnacle of broad accessibility.
Notice how if you click a tweet in the timeline, you do not get a overlay to show the conversation. Nope, it push away the tweets below to make room. Then when you click anywhere else on the site the conversation collapse back, shifting the position of surrounding tweets once more.
Similarly, the only way to see a image full size is to basically drag and drop it into a new tab. If you click it you just get a floating view that barely make use of 75% of the screen, with a copy of the related tweet below it.
To make use of the twitter site i find myself liberally middle and ctrl clicking timestamps and similar to throw tweets into new tabs.
And their latest "innovation", embedded tweets, basically wrecks their own conversation view. Now you can't click a tweet and see the reverse timeline. Nope, you have to click each of them in turn to dig into the dialog.
So they're pushing new features that heavy users will never see, because 3rd party clients are vastly superior.
It's a marvel their product managers and executives can get out of bed unassisted in the morning.
Developers and designers can benefit from this by not overspecifying how a technology is to be used until loads of feedback has returned. Kind of like the old story about the architect who didn't fill in the sidewalks until students had worn paths into the campus lawn :)
Steve is definitely faaaar above that threshold.
Seriously, this looks like something out of a consumer/UI facing open source project with 1000 contributors. (My favorite example: The glorious spectacle that is the VLC settings dialog.)
The important ones like conventions surrounding replies are weird artifacts left over from the early days of the product. Twitter bottlenecks quickly in lengthy conversations amongst multiple parties and you really have to carefully respect the social dynamics it creates, or people will just block your rude self. If there is one place where the product could use revision, it's in improving average case conversation quality.
This is Twitter's blessing and its curse: It's a game we willingly play to communicate within its limitations.
Even the greatest artists have to paint within the canvas. By making the canvas ludicrously small, limitations become a democratizing force.
I wonder how many people reading this just opened Notepad to try this.
alias log='(date; cat) >>'
~> log file.txt
Some log lines.
Followed by a control-D.
^D
~> log file.txt
And some more.
^D
~> cat file.txt
Sat Feb 27 00:16:49 PST 2016
Some log lines.
Followed by a control-D.
Sat Feb 27 00:17:04 PST 2016
And some more.
function log
set --local the_log $HOME/incomplete-logs/$argv[1]-(date "+%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S")
date >> $the_log
rlwrap cat >> $the_log
and cat $the_log >> $argv[1]
and mv $the_log (dirname $the_log)/../completed-logs/
end Ctrl+Windows logo key+Tab
Probably not in Windows 10, where the interface was made to look More Like Mobile.
Hah, yeah. I was curious about how these worked a while back and figured out that a tweet's "Impressions" includes any time someone reloads a timeline that includes your tweet somewhere within. This includes your own page loads, so if you open Twitter a few times throughout the day you'll see your tweets accumulate impressions by default. And if you're followed by a really active Twitter user, those numbers will be inflated quite a bit.
I'm not sure whether this is shortsightedness on Twitter's part or "convenient" padding of their numbers.
If you want "unique visits," you can look for unique visitors or unique impressions or just uniques, depending on what company you are working for.
(And if you are doing TV, you can get an estimate of how many people saw it on DVR in the next three days)
That's exactly the definition of the word "impression" for ad-serving systems.
- Twitter highlights impressions when it's a particularly useless metric for their platform. Why not expose uniques?
- Why include a user's own activity in their analytics data? Does anyone really want that?
- A tweet doesn't even have to appear on the screen to acquire an "impression". It could be far down the timeline and out of view, but as long as it's included in a batch in an API response, the counter goes up.
- This number is exposed to everyone, not just ad industry insiders, and is subtitled "number of times people saw this tweet" - but that's not what's counted.
The implementation may be technically correct, but it is, I think, misleadingly biased toward higher numbers. I can post a tweet and it can get 10 impressions in less than a minute, just from my clicking around. If I expand the tweet and click "reply" to attach another 140 characters, that's two "engagements". If I click a link to make sure it works, that's three. Honest values for those numbers would probably be zero.
This (the fact it's deterministic) is what makes Twitter so useful for me, and what drove me away from Facebook (with its stochastic Timeline).
Just recently they've also censored the #whichhillary hashtag.
The fact that twitter execs fundraise for Hillary Clinton must have no bearing on this, right?
http://reason.com/blog/2016/02/20/did-twitters-orwellian-tru...
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/2/26/1491618/-Twitter-Exe...
140
Edit: Actually fewer because consecutive newlines are reduced to two. so like...2/3 * 140 roughly
https://github.com/protocol https://github.com/dynamic
etc.
@IBOutlet and @IBAction appear to be available if you'd like some Swift issue spam!
This search results page also shows any highly relevant users, which is why @Path shows up. Searching for $MSFT will show the account for @microsoft, for example.
Twitter could use a good tutorial for new users, but it should be written as a tutorial for new users. Not as a "Here's a bunch of categorized random things."
(Jack hasn't been back long enough so not saying it's him.)