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.
2. April 2009 at 3:22 pm :
I wonder if it’s really just the Twitter UI that’s broken, or the model of Twitter in general.
That the UI is broken is evident in the proliferation of 3rd party software for following Twitter updates. Twitter provides perfectly functional mobile and web-based clients, and these are largely unused by anyone who would consider themselves a moderate-to-heavy user of the service. Definitely a sign of a UI problem. I read an article yesterday that had some pretty interesting thoughts on this bad UI issue. As for myself, I’ve been trying out Nambu lately, and with today’s update, it’s pretty usable.
In my opinion, though, it’s the Twitter model that’s broken. Rather, it’s evolved outside of where it was initially visualized to go, and isn’t suited for how it’s currently used by people like Scoble. It was probably never intended to be anything more than a quick updating mechanism. For example, the @reply mechanism was developed first as a convention by users — there was never meant to be any “addressing” of messages, just a broadcast. And that’s the way many people still use it — as a quick way to send an update or a link to a bunch of your friends. These days, with retweeting, @replies, and tinyURLs, it’s like reading a code.
Seeing the Scoble babble above is infuriating — 6 messages in 15 minutes, 3 of which were retweets and one a self-congratulatory “I took down a website!” message. Ugh. Unfollow.