Warning: this is going to be one of the more geeky/uninteresting posts in the history of this blog (and that’s saying something). I am going to criticize the user interface of Twitter. So just prepare yourself for that (or click “next” in Google Reader).
Here’s the problem:
I follow a fair number of people on Twitter. Not a crazy number, but enough so that during the day I tend to get at least 5 or 6 updates an hour. When I spend the whole day at the computer (or check in online every few hours), it’s no problem. Twitter’s home page shows 20 updates at a time, so unless I miss more than 20 tweets I can catch up all from the one page.
Where it gets tricky is when I miss more than 20 tweets. First of all, Twitter’s API limits client programs to seeing the most recent 20 updates. If there are more than 20 that I’ve missed, all but the most recent tweets simply don’t show up. This is aggravating, but understandable—Twitter bears the cost of serving updates to users’ clients (and if it served up everything, users could use clients and circumvent the site entirely); if they want to force people to their site for deep access to data, that’s fine with me. But if they do it that way, they really need to make sure that using the site isn’t a miserable experience. Speaking of which…
So what do I do if I’ve missed those 20+ tweets? If I’m out of town for a week, I don’t bother going back over the archived updates, but if I miss just a few hours I usually go to the Twitter site and page back to where I left off, using the “Older” button (when the “Older” button works—but that’s another story). So the problem here is that it’s a huge pain in the ass to do this—if I have to go back 50 or 60 updates, there’s not really an easier way to do it than to click on “Older” multiple times. What’s worse is that the cursor focus is set to the update text entry box, so I can’t even quickly page down to get to the “Older” button again. This is not smart design, because it assumes that my primary goal in loading an archive page is to post an update to my own account—but why would I have just clicked “Older” from the main page if what I wanted to do is update my account?
Anyway, back to my main critique. Because of the stolen focus, I have to click outside the text box, or use my mouse’s scroll button, to get down to the “Older” button. Meanwhile, I have no choice but to skim messages, looking for a familiar one, to figure out where I left off. So I’m stuck reading tweets in reverse order, navigating using an awkward, ungainly process that really doesn’t make much sense.
I propose that Twitter create a new process/UI for navigating through one’s update stream. Here’s how it would work:
Add a tab called “Timeline”. On the Timeline page, give me a basic horizontal timeline (or vertical would work too, and might fit in better with the general site design). Mark off the time by whatever makes sense—minutes, hours, days—depending on how many updates a user gets per day. Or alternately, create a logarithmic scale, so that the first timeline unit navigates by minutes, the next by hours, the next by days, etc., so it’s easy to skip back just an hour or two, or much more, all without messing around with settings. The latter idea appeals to me more, and once people get used to it would probably be easier to use, but it is not as simple as a regular old timeline.
Allow me to drag a slider on the timeline, to start reading missed tweets starting at any time on the spectrum. A live-updating box could display the tweet closest to whatever time the slider is at, and once I saw I was in the right neighborhood I could release the mouse on the slider. Starting with the tweet I’ve just seen, the page would display the proceeding tweets in chronological order (as opposed to the current “Older” pages, which display tweets in reverse chronological order—that makes sense for the main page, arguably, but it’s poor design for this purpose).
That’s about the extent to which I’ve thought this out, but I think, if you’ve actually made it this far, you’ll agree with me that with nothing but constructive criticism I’ve single-handedly made Twitter’s website a million times better.
I took the California bar exam in Ontario, which is near Los Angeles. Also, it’s about 10 miles away from the epicenter of the 5.4 earthquake that hit towards the end of the first morning. So that was nice. But aside from that, things seemed to go fine. I mean, I have massive doubts and regrets, but I think that’s normal and not really indicative of how I did. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I won’t get my results until November, so there’s not really much use in stressing out about them until then.
After the bar, I had a celebratory meal at Benihana (their Mai Tais are fantastic, even if you don’t drink out of a ceramic buddha), then went to sleep at a reasonable hour. I’m pathetic. The next day I flew up to San Francisco for the weekend. I stayed with a friend from college and had a very good time. Featured were:
Drinks at The Orbit Room, a fantastic lounge with bespoke cocktails and a clever vintage aeronautic theme.
Watching karaoke at The Mint. The performance quality was a letdown after my last visit there, but the entertainment value was quite high nonetheless. The highlight of the evening for me was getting verbally ambushed by a truly drunk astrology aficionado whose buddy Reuben wouldn’t return her calls. After a series of sarcastic remarks that she understood to be sincere, she asked for my phone number, but I gave her a fake number! OMG YOU GUYS, I’M A PLAYER! So that was fun.
Playing softball on Treasure Island. For the record, as best I can recall I went 4 of 6 with 3 infield singles, and had a pretty unimpressive fielding day at third base. But I had one solid putout, which is probably the first time in my entire life I’ve successfully thrown a runner out at first base. Baseball: not my best sport.
Potpourri: Playing a bunch of card games, spilling at least one glass of wine, spending a lot of time on Muni/BART, having eggs benedict in Rockridge, helping my friends pick out a hookah at a smokeshop staffed by a cliché.
Next, I flew up to Vancouver, where I stayed at this hostel. This is a pretty fun place to stay, but I think I may be too old for it. Everyone seems to be approximately 17 years old (and to have been travelling the world for at least a decade). But it’s cheap, central to downtown Vancouver (and in very close proximity to any number of sex shops and vagrants), and has free wifi. Here are things I’ve been up to in Vancouver:
Meeting up with my internet friend Tim. Tim is real life friends with some other internet friends who I have met before and overall, I don’t totally hate him. So that’s a plus. Anyway, he and I hung out a fair amount, which was good, since I don’t know anyone else in Vancouver.
We played Pitch ‘n’ Putt in Stanley Park. It’s 18 holes of between 50 and 100 yards each, using a pitching wedge and a putter. It was surprisingly similar to real golf. I kicked Tim’s ass, but he had the only birdie of the group, so I guess it’s a wash.
Saw Batman again. I feel the same way: very good, not perfect, occasionally too implausible/stupid, but overall very well done and enjoyable.
Had sushi and gelato. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Walked all over the place. Like, 6 miles on Monday, 13.5 miles on Tuesday, 10 miles on Wednesday, and, er, .2 miles so far today. The weather has been a little warm, but not too bad (no rain so far!). I’ve got a hilarious raccoon tan from wearing my sunglasses all the time.
Spent a ridiculous amount of time dealing with technology. Charging my iPod, phone, laptop, trying to find wifi all over the city, having all access to ATMs cut off, going to FUTURESHOP (Canadian Best Buy) to replace the camera Tim managed to lose during a nap... but on the plus side, I’ve had a lot of luck getting free wifi on this trip, which has been a huge help. I don’t know what people did before cell phones and ubiquitous internet access—I don’t think I could get around without it.
Now I have a few more hours to kill before I head off to the airport for the short trip to Seattle (I should have taken the ferry, but I’m an idiot), where I will spend the weekend doing fun things. Then I spend a week with the fam before going back to Boston to pack up my life and head down to DC.
One more thought I have been deeply yearning to share:
Brett Favre: sucks. He retired, and then double retired when the team asked if he was sure about it. The team moved on. He reneged. The team refused to drop his contract, to prevent him from signing on with one of their division rivals. He whined on national television. They couldn’t get any decent trades for him, because his whining made it clear that they would be desperate to get rid of him (and thus had no leverage). Yet somehow this guy is a victim? Bah, humbug.
My internet friend Tracy wrote a post about Deadspin that kind of blew up. Here’s the lede:
The thing about sports is that it, well, tends to be an old-boys’ club. The sports world is full of sexist shit that pisses me off if I think about it too much (and, honestly, I’m not often prone to do that, because I don’t always want to be addressing Big Issues in the context of something I enjoy just for the hell of it, which I suppose is lazy of me). Commercials aired during sporting events or programs often are sexist. There are sexist athletes and sexist columnists, and I hate it all, but I try not to hold it against sports as a whole. That would be like being a Cubs fan, but hating the Cubs because of Cubs fans.
That said, there’s one place where the sports assholes come out in droves and it drives me batshit insane every freaking time I see it. It’s a land where you’ll see Asshole Stupidus in its natural environment, taking a gigantic dump on women and human decency.
It’s the land of the Deadspin commenters.
I was going to leave a comment there but figured I might as well put it here instead, since it’s important that many people in the world know how I feel about this issue.
Okay guys. Tomorrow morning I head off to California to take a test. It’ll be over on Thursday, after which I will be on vacation for a while.
I’ll be in San Francisco from the 1st to the 4th, then in Vancouver from the 4th to the 7th, then in Seattle from the 7th to the 10th. It’s not a lot of time in any of those places, but I’m hoping to be able to meet up with anybody who’s around. Leave me a comment here or email me (calamityjake at gmail dot com) if you want to make that happen—although I may not be able to get back to you til after the exam is over.
Good luck to everyone else who’s taking the bar—I’ll be back on the internet, hopefully with something more interesting to say, in August.
I really enjoyed this interview between Dan “DC Sports Bog” Steinberg and Chris “Chris Cooley’s Official Blog” Cooley. It made me feel a bit bad for Fabini. Also, when Cooley mentioned that his blog gets ten or fifteen thousand hits a day, it made me feel a bit bad for myself.
If you don’t have time for the whole thing, you can just catch the highlights at this page.
Lately, a bunch of my RSS feeds have been silent all day (or sometimes longer than a day), then popping up with dozens of new items all at once. Usually it’s a bunch of posts I haven’t seen yet, but occasionally it’s a bunch of old ones. What I want to know is whether this is a Google Reader problem, or, e.g., a GawkerPlex problem. Have any of you who don’t use Google Reader (are there any of you?) run into this problem?
Second problem: For some reason, as of a week or so ago, Google Reader is including all of my shared items (which, pretty much by definition, I’ve already read) in my “Unread Items” count. It’s also including them in my “All Items” stream, so I can’t practically use that to scan my new items.
Is this what resting on your laurels look like? Or is Google’s development team busy working out the kinks on Google Reader 2.0?
Disjointed Batman thoughts (with tons of spoilers) after the jump. To be clear, I talk about lots of stuff that happened in the movie, so if you haven’t seen it yet and want to be surprised, do not read the rest of this.
My name's Jake, and I live in Boston MA. I write about lots of stuff and you might be interested in some of it. You can reach me at calamityjake at gmail dot com.
Here is a list of everywhere I produce stuff on the internet.
August 15, 2008 
Posted in Tech 
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