Our users (http://twalala.com) have been asking for a better login mechanism since we launched. It'll be really nice to finally be able to deliver something better. Looking forward to it!
It's great to see that the OAuth beta received so many beta applicants so quickly that Twitter had to stop accepting participants for the beta. That's really encouraging to see the Twitter development community excited about something that requires them to implement more code, in order to makes more secure for their users.
I can't wait to see the first few Twitter apps/mashups using OAuth. :)
I noted you posted to the twitter dev mailing list with that. I don't understand it at all. This is mainly because the site is really difficult to parse.
Can you explain it in 50 characters? Now make that explanation really big on your front page, under the site name, which should be bigger. Organize all the content below that, and make login/account creation on a separate page.
I think the problems are pretty much 100% visual presentation.
My eye isn't drawn to anything. You have a standard font for a name. Make it closer to a logo, and much bigger. It's ok to center it, but the whole top area is centered, and doesn't look good.
The red line + highlighted line highlights neither. Then the horizontal line of users is confusing. Make it a grid and put it in a sidebar. I like the score idea, but draw in the the user to want to get that score up. Perhaps mirror twitter.grader.com and just let a user enter their twitter username to find some fake score that can be improved by using the site.
I get the concept but my problems with the app are
1) what's the point?
As in, really... What's the point? Success for Twitter users is to get people to recognize their brand/personality and not so much piecemeal tweets. Just reading individual tweets of random strangers is boring. And if I wanted to read topical messages I would just use summize.
2) why is this engaging?
As Twitter increase towards more to conversational styles amongst its users, an out of context message is jarring. To the point where I have not much interest in perusing your site. In fact, if the person is interesting at all I would much rather just follow them. But a Twitter user recommendation engine this is not.
3) how do I know this is working?
The instructions to find the missing word makes it awkward. How do I know the missing word is because of the app in play or because the original Twitter user wasn't dyslexic? It's also too much of a chore to parse and reparse a 140 character sentence to see if it's broken. Brains don't work that way--we automatically self-correct sentence subconsciously.
If someone encounters a tweet you wrote that he/she likes, he/she might check out your twitter page and possibly follow you.
And even if you don't get many new followers, it is still a way to get people to read your tweets.
Unlike a recommendation engine, this one allows you to get lots of people to read your tweets if you are willing to put in the effort reading other people's tweets.
