

Twitter Comes Alive With Realtime Activity Streams - schlichtm
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/10/twitter-activity-streams/

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olivercameron
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.

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Vexenon
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.

~~~
citricsquid
I agree. I think the problem is Twitter already _is_ a "news feed", it's user
provided though. In 99% of cases I don't care if x follows y, whereas on
Facebook if x is now friends with y "Hey, I might know Y! Oh, they're someone
from high school I haven't spoken to for years!".

It feels unnecessary and irrelevant to Twitter.

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stephth
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.

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flocial
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.

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danilocampos
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.

~~~
olefoo
It is a tough problem, I'm pretty aggressive about using the 'block and report
as spam' option on TweetDeck, but every so often an account that I've thought
was trustworthy will start spewing links that "Make Money Fast".

Why just this afternoon, an iPhone dev who works for a YC funded company...

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danilocampos
Ha. Indeed. I don't even know how my account got hijacked. Pretty unsettling.

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olefoo
Given what they did to my browser (I followed the stupid link, in part b/c of
who it came from) I'm guessing you hit a booby trapped page while you were
logged into twitter.

But that's a theory for which I don't have direct evidence, merely the
unreasonable effectiveness of their browser hijacking.

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corin_
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.

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tomjen3
Buh, here I thought they fixed the "2 more tweets, click to reload" to
automatically reload.

We don't need more distractions.

