Obama The Brand

From the 37Signals security page – “the world’s most respected brands trust our web-based products to run their businesses”.

Interesting. Just goes to show how effective and pervasive the Obama movement is. The brand has staying power. And the logo looks good right next to Adidas, Trek and Kellogg’s.

Palm Pre Looks Good

Here’s a video demo of the Pandora app on the Palm Pre.

Not bad at all. Hopefully, I am going to have to eat my words.

More videos here.

The Twitter UI Is Broken

Like many people, I’ve been using Twitter more regularly over the last several months. I’ve always been interested (and a big believer) in technologies that promote social connectedness and Twitter certainly falls in this category.

I am finding that I get a lot of value from it when I follow my friends – it’s an excellent way to stay in touch. However, it’s becoming really apparent to me that the Twitter interface presented to us by applications such as Twitterrific and TweetDeck leave a lot to be desired, especially when you follow people who are heavy users and post several times a day.

Case in point: Robert Scoble. Here’s a guy who attends dozens of tech events a year and whose job revolves around communicating ideas and sending links around. I want to follow him, I find that his content is good. But all list-based Twitter clients make following someone like him really hard. Here’s what my TweetDeck app looked like this morning:

I like to see what Robert is up to, but this interface makes it really hard to read all of his tweets and follow all the links. Not to mention that someone like Robert overshadows all of my friend’s tweets, a problem that can be mitigated in TweetDeck through groups. But that’s just part of the story.

Twitter is powerful because it’s a universal messaging platform – it’s used in so many different ways by so many people. I would love to see (and hopefully contribute to) interfaces that are designed specifically for certain uses, such as following a small group of close friends, or see what powerful networkers like Robert Scoble are doing and sharing with the world. One-fits-all interfaces like what we have today, especially at the desktop level, dilute the user experience any way you look at it.