
Twitters new and blazingly fast interface - ColinWright
http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/Twitters+new+and+blazingly+fast+interface
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corin_
I hate #newtwitter more than anyone, but I disagree with the logic that just
because people don't like it, it's neccesarily a bad move - lot's of people
don't like change.

I've seen it a couple of times on big community websites when people
complained about a new design, and then a week later realised that just
because it started off not feeling like the site they grew to love, it didn't
mean it wasn't a huge improvement.

They key is that, after you force users to switch, it has to be good enough
that they realise you were acting in their best interests - if you force them
to switch to something that really is much worse, that's when it becomes a
problem.

I was wondering: if someone used the Twitter API to create basically a clone
of the original site, would that be against the Ts & Cs, and if not could this
be got around somehow. For example if someone made it and open sourced it, I
could host it myself with my own API key, and without marketing it anyone
other than myself and my friends Twitter wouldn't know or care?

~~~
thaumaturgy
> _...just because people don't like it, it's neccesarily a bad move..._

In business, it almost always is.

If your user base is uncomfortable with significant changes to your design or
interface, you should take that into account. Why are you changing the design
or interface? Is it really improving their experience, or is it just because
you like the new one better? Why not roll out a new design in lots of small
changes over the course of a year or more, so that people don't tend to feel
as disoriented?

You should keep in mind that _a lot_ of people out there don't have the
learned ability to glance at a screen and immediately pick out the relevant
bits. Many of them deal with lots of different interfaces every day. When you
radically change your design, for these people it's like having to learn a
whole new site all over again.

~~~
corin_
In my personal experience people very quickly realised the new interface was
fine - but when you've been using a site for years you get used to it, and
like how it looks. As others replied, Facebook is another great example -
people complaining doesn't mean they won't end up prefering the new version.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Sure, and if that's the case, then I don't see any downsides to rolling out a
new design in small pieces over the course of a yearabouts, so that it doesn't
annoy your users at all.

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jnorthrop
"Hint: if people stick to your old interface rather than to migrate to the new
and shiny one then they probably have their reasons. Forcing them is not going
to make them happy."

This leads to a dangerous line of thinking. There will always be a group of
users who are resistant to change, and during a time of change they will be
most vocal. If you listen to them you'll stagnate -- which is almost always
the kiss-of-death for a company like Twitter. To be innovative you have to
take risks and that includes the risk of angering certain people.

~~~
0x12
Slower+buggy is not an improvement.

I can't count the number of times that the new interface has reported 'twitter
is over capacity', 'you have already tweeted that' (when it wasn't true) and a
whole pile of other errors, if it worked at all. Page load times of several
minutes on a 10 Mbit connection on a very fast machine are ridiculous.

Of course you have to 'take risks to innovate'. But rolling out buggy and slow
software is not innovation, especially not when it breaks web conventions
(take a look at the new urls).

~~~
mnutt
Those two things sound like backend capacity issues, rather than frontend. The
frontend as I understand it is almost all static HTML/JS. So they may be
having capacity issues, but that would be true whether they stayed on the old
twitter or moved to the new twitter.

~~~
corin_
I'm not sure what the cause is exactly, but back when they let you chose
between new and old, I found that it was always slower and less reliable on
the new version of the site. And it hasn't got any better since they killed
off the old version.

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Wilya
I really am curious as to why the new interface works so absurdly badly.

It's not even a question of being a bit slow, the thing uses constantly 90% of
my cpu (I'm using a low end netbook), which makes it technically unusable, and
it's not like it does that much work. Hell, it just print a timeline.

The only thing missing from the mobile interface is a basic auto-refresh
function.

~~~
brown9-2
90% of your CPU?

I am the only one who has never seen problems like this with it?

~~~
soult
I have the same problem. Sure, my computer is five years and my browser three
years old, but still, no website should be so unusable that you can't use it
on older hardware.

Especially if you consider what Twitter is. It is not a 1080p streaming site
like Youtube (which works fine btw), it is not some complicated Office suite
like Google Docs (which works fine btw), it is just a site that displays short
messages on my computer screen. I don't see a reason why Twitter even needs
Javascript at all.

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jcromartie
I don't get the bitching about the new UI. What is he talking about when he
says "pages that take several minutes to load"? Is he talking about the
regular twitter.com UI? It loads in less than a second and is otherwise
completely responsive.

~~~
dangrossman
Except when the API is overloaded, which is often. Then Twitter.com just spins
for a long while and gives a message about trying again while failing to load
your tweets at all.

~~~
dpcan
I have twitter's new UI open in a tab all day long. I click the "X new tweets"
button abou 20 times a day. I read tweets, checkout other twitterer's feeds,
and it never ever slows down for me.

When I read about this guy seeing over a minute page loads, all I could think
was, something is wrong with your computer or network dude.

~~~
dangrossman
Maybe your day does not line up with times Twitter has had capacity issues.
Maybe it's maintenance during non-peak hours. I don't know, except that I've
definitely seen Twitter's new UI time out as often as I saw the fail whale in
the old UI.

------
jen_h
The old UI had its issues, but it was much faster than the new one. Issues I
see on a daily with new Twitter:

\- There're a lot of little weird inefficiencies if you use the keyboard - for
instance, if you expand a tweet, space bar no longer works to continue
scrolling down the page unless you tap over.

\- Scrolling can be slowwww. Can't scroll back more than 3 hours or so in my
timeline, without getting an infinite loading animation or no option to
continue viewing at all. This was especially a pain for me when I was on PDT,
it meant I basically couldn't catch up with the early EDT news unless I
switched to my mobile client.

\- "You've already tweeted that." "Sorry, we couldn't X, please try again
later." and so on...

Then there's the search overhaul, which actually bummed me out a lot more:

\- Now, search results continually default to "Top" instead of "All,"
requiring a manual change.

\- Tweet translation's been removed. :(

\- Interface suffers the same issues (infinite loading spinner) that plague
the new Twitter interface. The old search interface was really stripped down
and fast.

I love Twitter, it's been super-important to me both personally and for my
business; but I really would pay a subscription fee to get some efficiency
back into my daily morning Twitter routine (i.e., ++scroll-speed, at least 48
hours of search history, bring automated tweet translation back, multiple
account support). $5/month would be a serious bargain, especially considering
these features would give me an extra hour or more back every day.

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ColinWright
It's not that new - I've been using this ever since twitter said they would
close down the old interface and force the new one upon me. It's fast, nearly
complete, and convenient.

It also doesn't have the incredibly annoying "endless page" scroll.

Much to be preferred.

~~~
lloeki
Certainly the "new" part of the title is full of irony, emphasizing the desire
of people to get something else than the bloated, crawling, min_width=1024px,
url-raping atrocity that is the new_twitter.

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kingsidharth
>> "if people stick to your old interface rather than to migrate to the new
and shiny one then they probably have their reason"

Sounds like one of those "Get 1 Million and facebook will revert back XYZ"
Groups. Everyone has one. It's a good thing they are experimenting.

~~~
kokey
I was going to say this Twitter interface rant reminds me of all the people
complaining every time Facebook changes their layout. I suspect Facebook now
makes changes in smaller increments, since these complaints have gone down.

------
iamjustlooking
Sometimes I feel like the only one who likes new twitter.

~~~
_delirium
I don't actually dislike it overall in concept, but it feels very buggy to me
in implementation. Sometimes it will just stop working entirely until I
reload: clicking on a tweet to have a detail view slide out in the right panel
will work for a while, then at some point I click a few times on a tweet and
nothing happens. Not sure if some script is hanging or it's due to timeouts or
what, but I notice this throughout the interface, which makes it feel very
unpredictable.

I would like middle-click-to-open-in-new-tab to work more consistently as
well.

------
wgx
I either use Twitter on OS X or Tweetbot on the iPhone - I can't remember the
last time I saw the twitter.com site at all...

~~~
thenduks
I mostly use the same apps you do on a day-to-day basis -- but honestly you
should try the site sometime. It's pretty sweet.

It's especially useful when you want to find new people to follow. You can
poke around really easily, read conversations and see photos they've posted
and who they follow, etc etc. It feels optimized for discovering new stuff.

~~~
wgx
I'll give it a whirl - although, using the apps keeps me nicely shielded from
"Promoted Tweets" and the Trending topics, neither of which I have any
interest in.

~~~
thenduks
Agreed, but I don't find that stuff especially in-my-face on the site --
although I have adblock installed, not really sure what effect it has on the
site. I generally visit twitter.com once or twice a week just to poke around
and see what I can find and then go back to the native apps.

------
robjohnson
I'd be interested to hear the decision making process that twitter used to
implement the new interface. Were the changes driven by the users? What metric
did they use to determine if the change was a success or not? Was it
successful?

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emp_
Agreed. I have been using this for the last couple months since I uninstalled
my client on Windows (MetroTwit) at work and won't check my phone all the
time, the manual refresh is very "on demand" and I love it.

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wesnet
But there is no automatic update on my home TL in the mobile version

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masnick
Wow, this is great.

This would be good pinned to the status bar (OS X) with Fluid
(<http://fluidapp.com>).

~~~
Synaesthesia
Yeah, but the twitter app is even better for me on OS X.

~~~
masnick
Hah, I've never actually looked at the Twitter app for OS X. I'll check it
out.

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davedx
The mobile site took 15 seconds to load for me.

Blazingly fast, Twitter? In another reality, maybe

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Karunamon
+1 to the "WTF" comments. I don't seem to have these issues with new twitter
being slow, or using 90% CPU, or failing, or any of these other complaints.

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larrywright
No keyboard shortcuts is a dealbreaker.

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durga
Simplicity and MVP wins. This is a heck of a lot better than the overloaded
design twitter has adopted.

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Zakuzaa
I dont even bother opening twitter on ipad anymore. Will try out this mobile
interface.

~~~
chadgeidel
Is there an "iPad native" (built for the larger screen) app for Twitter? I'm
using the iPhone version and it's very responsive.

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foobarbazetc
The mobile site is slower than newtwitter for me.

And way worse.

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follower
I think the mobile search is more reliable/goes back further also.

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dreamdu5t
It is slow. Why does twitter need so much JS and poor CSS to accomplish so
little? They should take a cue from their mobile site.

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swah
Just copy Google groups interface (old one!) already! I can shift+a 1000
messages in a second!

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Andi
No, I miss my lists.

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rajpaul
does twitter still use mostly ruby? i remember hearing something about scaling
problems that were supposedly caused by ruby.

~~~
rbranson
The "new" interface is actually entirely JavaScript and just exchanges JSON
with an HTTP endpoint. This removes a big chunk of "slow" in Rails, which is
view rendering. Of course, the actual services behind this endpoint could be
based on Scala or Rails or any other language and are probably heavily cached.

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pradeek
This is the mobile site. It has always been here. There is even a link on the
Home page(though not directly)

