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Twitter's missing manual

eev.ee

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Re: Twitter's missing manual

#3

Post by johansch »

Wow. I didn't know it was this bad. They probably have too many developers and "product manager of x" types, with no one person really in charge? So it ends up being a race for lots of people to get their pet feature in... Repeat for a decade.

Seriously, this looks like something out of a consumer/UI facing open source project with 1000 contributors. (My favorite example: The glorious spectacle that is the VLC settings dialog.)

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#4

Post by mbrock »

Nobody who needs to read this is going to have the patience to read it.

If you make 10 screenshots of tweets that illustrate the various things you need to know, with a brief one-paragraph explanation for each, that might do the trick.

People don't really want to know how the thing works. They really want to know how it's typically used, so they can make tweets that blend in and make it seems like they know what they're doing.

(And yes, it's pretty hard to figure out how to actually use Twitter correctly.)

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#5

Post by chipsy »

johansch wrote: post #3

Wow. I didn't know it was this bad. They probably have too many developers and "product manager of x" types, with no one person really in charge? So it ends up being a race for lots of people to get their pet feature in... Repeat for a decade. Seriously, this looks like something out of a consumer/UI facing open source project with 1000 contributors. (My favorite example: The glorious spectacle that is the VLC settin…

Most of these things really come down to implementation detail(e.g. formatting rules), and they are mostly interesting for aesthetic purposes.

The important ones like conventions surrounding replies are weird artifacts left over from the early days of the product. Twitter bottlenecks quickly in lengthy conversations amongst multiple parties and you really have to carefully respect the social dynamics it creates, or people will just block your rude self. If there is one place where the product could use revision, it's in improving average case conversation quality.

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#6

Post by mintplant »

> the analytics tools (pretty but pointless)

Hah, yeah. I was curious about how these worked a while back and figured out that a tweet's "Impressions" includes any time someone reloads a timeline that includes your tweet somewhere within. This includes your own page loads, so if you open Twitter a few times throughout the day you'll see your tweets accumulate impressions by default. And if you're followed by a really active Twitter user, those numbers will be inflated quite a bit.

I'm not sure whether this is shortsightedness on Twitter's part or "convenient" padding of their numbers.

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#7

Post by Uhhrrr »

mbrock wrote: post #4

Nobody who needs to read this is going to have the patience to read it. If you make 10 screenshots of tweets that illustrate the various things you need to know, with a brief one-paragraph explanation for each, that might do the trick. People don't really want to know how the thing works. They really want to know how it's typically used, so they can make tweets that blend in and make it seems like they know what they…

I think this actually makes it more fun!

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#8

Post by bpicolo »

cballard wrote: post #2

> Tweets may contain newlines, and there doesn’t seem to be any limit to how many. 140

138 rather, because of stripped space.

Edit: Actually fewer because consecutive newlines are reduced to two. so like...2/3 * 140 roughly

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