

Twitter Redesigns Around Four Concepts: Home Timeline, Connect, Discover, Me - sahillavingia
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/08/twitter-resigns-around-four-concepts-home-timeline-connect-discover-me-letsfly/

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raganwald

        Twitter redesigns
                  ^^

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rsoto
Judging from the URL, it seems like TC's mistake, altough OP just posted it as
it is.

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tomkarlo
If you swipe left on the "Me" button at the bottom of the iPhone app, it
brings up an account selection screen. That seems like a mind-boggling UI
decision to me - a swipeable button with no affordance for the swipe and no
indication of why it reacted differently to a swipe than a press.

Update: apparently if you swipe up, it shows you DMs. So once you touch that
button, you're probably going to some screen, even if you don't want to.

I can imagine the product meeting now: "You're getting rid of the DM icon?"
"Yeah, but we'll figure out a way users can get to it directly."

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king_magic
I almost didn't believe you about swipe-left-on-Me. I... just don't
understand. What could have possibly made them think that was a good idea? I
would have _never_ figured that out in a million years.

Yes, it's true that under "Me" is a "Switch Accounts" button that does the
exact same thing, and that's fine, but the idea of implementing swipe-left-on-
Me seems to go completely against Apple's HIG and the entire notion of
intuitively discovering functionality.

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Hrothgar15
You can swipe left from Me _across the tab bar_ which flips the view over.
Makes perfect sense if you think about it.

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tomkarlo
At least on iOS there's nothing to imply that's a tab bar, and certainly no
visual affordance of that action. Maybe you're on Android - I'm hearing
comments from Android that make it sound like the UI is more "tabby" on that
version.

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ashamedlion
I absolutely love updates, but the new iPhone app feels like a big F U to
power users. They're de-emphasizing direct messages by putting them a level
down in the "Me" tab and switching accounts if you have multiple is found in
the same place.

Also, not a fan of the wasted space on the sides of the tweet feed. However,
the new web design looks great.

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bmuon
I wouldn't expect the "official" apps to be power user friendly. TweetDeck
will remain the app for the PU.

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sabret00the
Have you seen what they've done to Tweetdeck? They've dumbed it down and made
it incredibly difficult for PUs. I suspect we'll finally see an open source
alternative pop up.

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kristofferR
I think it's time for Twitter to move away from the strict 140 letter limit.
It has served them well, but not anymore. Now it's just severely restricting
the usefulness of the service and if they don't fix it soon Google+ will grab
a lot of Twitter-users who are limited by the limit, like myself.

I don't have the time or enough things I'd like to say in order for it to
warrant getting a blog, but not everything I'd like to say fits into 140
characthers either.

It would actually relatively easy for Twitter to fix this issue. Just do it
like Reddit does for self-posts. Simply enable people to embed text the same
way it lets people embed pictures and videos.

It solves all the major issues Twitter is having - people will stop shortening
their tweets so much that they lose their intended meaning/readablity, Google+
stops having a major content advantage due to no characther limit and the feed
won't get cluttered by walls of text (unlike Google+).

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msbarnett
I really disagree. The forced constraints of Twitter are its greatest virtue.

I can follow 200+ people only because I know that they'll be _forced_ to be
concise in what they say and how they say it. Google+ felt unwieldily at a
half-dozen people because at some point each of them would succumb to the
temptation to write a 1600+ word post, and no matter how interesting I found
them, it turned the act of surveying my timeline from a nearly effortless,
quick glance experience into a depressing exercise in reminding myself that
there were endless reams of text I was falling behind on and could never hope
to find the time to catch up with.

I have the same problem with RSS readers; beyond some very low limit, it
becomes dispiriting to see how much stuff I will never find the time to keep
up with, so I stop using the app. Twitter doesn't have this effect on me
precisely because it forces everyone to be brief and digestible.

A "New Twitter" in which I have to curate my timeline down from 200 to 6 is a
Twitter I just stop using.

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kristofferR
No offense, but did you actually read my post? Since I mentioned the exact
same issue and presented a solution I guess you didn't.

As I said - clutter in the timeline wouldn't be an issue like it is on
Google+, since the extra "embedded text" would be hidden by default, just like
on Reddit.

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msbarnett
Twitter currently forces you to express your entire thought in 140 characters.
Or, at most, in some small multiple of 140-character posts. Usually the
friction of splitting something out like that caps people at around 3 posts.

Your "self post" style idea with hidden "embedded text" would only really
force people to be concise with what effectively become the "titles" of their
rambling, hidden, posts. It does nothing to solve any of the problems created
when you lift the arbitrary conciseness limit; the manner in which people
express ideas gets flabby when they have infinite space in which to express
them.

I don't want a timeline full of titles to posts I'm rarely going to click
into. That's a big decrease in the value Twitter is providing to me.

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macrael
A lot of the posts in my stream contain links to images, videos, and articles.
In a sense, the 140 characters (minus the 20 required for a url) already _are_
a title for something more time consuming. I'm not sure that hosting self
posts would really change that, it just makes it easier. Instead of linking to
my blog post, I link to a twitter provided long post.

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hrabago
Twitter has become like GMail for me - I access the service but not the
application. I've been using the Mail app on the iPhone to access all my GMail
accounts, and use Tweetbot for Twitter. The services keep tweaking their own
UI's, but as long as they don't block the functionalities that 3rd party apps
need, I think I'll be fine.

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wgx
Same here - plus "Twitter for Mac" on OS X. I can't remember the last time I
went to twitter.com, it's very rare anyway.

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fedxc
Paul Haddad (Tweetbot dev) should be thanking Twitter.

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shinratdr
If you check his timeline, you'll notice that he did.

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sabret00the
Normally I don't give too much stock to redesigns of any particular service
when there are clients that do the job much better. But seeing as they've
destroyed Tweetdeck, once the new design reaches me, I'll probably give it a
go before finding another service. At that point, I'll probably move towards
something like Tumblr for my mundane chat designed to break up my working day.

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gojomo
Like the changes conceptually; the unified 'Connect' timeline has already
highlighted to me retweets I'd have otherwise misssed.

Hate the new iPhone font/margin choices. Text seems smaller, fainter with no
setting to enlarge. New gray margins noticeably waste precious space that
could be communication.

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ry0ohki
Surprised it still doesn't have hyperlinks (and Twitter handles mentioned)
clickable from the Timeline. Echofon has done this forever, and the Twitter
desktop client does it.

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flyosity
It's more computationally expensive to calculate, draw and attach tap events
to rows in a UITableView if you're trying to still keep 60fps scrolling. It's
hard enough to get glass-like scrolling with dynamically-loading avatars and
random strings of text at different font sizes all over, but tappable things
and highlighting makes it even harder.

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BigZaphod
Twitterrific has done this for a long time. It was hard to make it perform
well, but not impossible.

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Hrothgar15
Still not 60 FPS. :)

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gaving
Fairly skeptical initially, but liking the changes so far. Web interface seems
a lot more stable and fiddly too.

You'll pry my tweet bot from my cold, dead hands though.

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venturebros
How do I get access to the new web version? On the twitter site is says to
download the new app which I did so now how do I get the new web version?

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garethsprice
Open the app and log in, it seems to set some kind of flag on your account.
Then after a refresh on the desktop, the new client appears.

Interesting technique, are they trying to drive downloads of the mobile client
or are they using "people who can/will download the latest mobile client" as a
proxy to select power users to test the new interface on?

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venturebros
Got it finally! It took about an hour just refreshed again and it is there.

I am not a power user. Perhaps they found that more people tweet from mobile
devices that is why they doing it this way?

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thwarted
I count five items, not four, in that headline.

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dmbass
1\. Home Timeline

2\. Connect

3\. Discover

4\. Me

