Twitter Comes Alive With Realtime Activity Streams

It's interesting that Twitter seems to be getting a similar backlash to what Facebook did when they launched the News Feed, and look how that turned out. Some people loved it, some people hated it (a lot), but I can't imagine Facebook without it today.

This is going to change how people interact with Twitter, moving from one single place to consume to two, I'm curious how that will work out. I don't think I'd look at it all that often, it just feels like another place they will eventually cover with ads.

I really, really don't like it. It's like bringing a mini News Feed to Twitter, and the layout just doesn't work for me. I'll try to give it a chance, but my early impressions are that it's just a messy, cluttered News Feed implementation.

I used to think that this content (the new activity feed) being hard to get was an intentional, thoughtful design. It felt nice in contrast with using Facebook, which gives me an unpleasant feeling of everybody observing every single action I make. Turns out Twitter sees it as a missing feature.

It's just one of those things that people say it's not a good idea then get used to it. However, it does provide a great way for spammers to get into your activity stream. It also gets in the way of twitter's casual model of following and un-following when you raise the visibility a notch.

Every time Twitter announces a new feature I grit my teeth, clench my sphincter and rasp, mostly to myself, "What. About. Spam."

It mystifies me that they're content to do so little as this slowly but surely erodes the quality of the Twitter experience. Between scale and spammer volume, I get that it's not an easy problem. But give me something, here.

The activity stream just feels pointless for me. Favourites, I don't care, if it's worth me reading then they can retweet it. Retweets, they show up in my stream, if I want to see them specifically I could under the old system thanks to the specific retweets page. Who my friends start following just isn't interesting, and just wastes the space.

And I disagree with TechCrunch's "oh, people hate change, they're not thinking rationally" theory. When newtwitter beta launched last year (I guess 11-12 months ago, can't quite remember) I thought it was cool for about ten minutes, then hated it, and switched back to original twitter, where I stayed until the move was forced last week. In the week I've been using it solidly, I still hate it. And I'm not exactly on my own, EVERY friend I have that uses twitter either moans regularly about newtwitter, or has switched to an external client to avoid using it. Sure, that's a bunch of specific cases not an overall study, but it shows it's not a rare opinion to have.

Buh, here I thought they fixed the "2 more tweets, click to reload" to automatically reload.

We don't need more distractions.