Death to Twitter’s “Older” Button

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.