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Twitter's missing manual

eev.ee

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Re: Twitter's missing manual

#21

Post by blakeyrat »

mintplant wrote: post #6

> 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…

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

That's exactly the definition of the word "impression" for ad-serving systems.

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#23

Post by ebbv »

This isn't a good manual for Twitter because it doesn't distinguish between features, quirks, bugs and just "interesting tidbits". It just lumps things together categorically. That means anyone who is new to Twitter is gonna get halfway through the first section and be lost.

Twitter could use a good tutorial for new users, but it should be written as a tutorial for new users. Not as a "Here's a bunch of categorized random things."

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#24

Post by lingben »

Too little, too late. Twitter has the most abysmal UI/UX I've ever seen, especially when you consider its clout and popularity (although that is fast waning).

Any meaningful change will be so jarring that the dyed in the wool users will balk at it, kicking up a storm of protests and it will not serve to bring in new users (they come in not for good UI but for the network effect - but they don't use it and leave because of the UI).

I honestly can't believe how insanely horrible twitter UI is - and it seems to be something that all twitter users have agreed to never mention. It just leaves one breathless after it opens the FOURTH modal window on top of the previous three that it had already opened.

On the bright side of things, for anyone teaching UI, twitter is a fantastic example of what NOT to do.

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#25

Post by [deleted] »

mrestko wrote: post #20
cornellwright wrote: post #9

> On one end of the spectrum you have tools like Notepad, where the only easter egg is that pressing F5 inserts the current time. I wonder how many people reading this just opened Notepad to try this.

I believe adding ".LOG" to the beginning of file also automatically inserts the date each time you open the file so you can use it as a journal. I don't have access to Windows right now to test that though.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#26

Post by dsp1234 »

mrestko wrote: post #20
cornellwright wrote: post #9

> On one end of the spectrum you have tools like Notepad, where the only easter egg is that pressing F5 inserts the current time. I wonder how many people reading this just opened Notepad to try this.

I believe adding ".LOG" to the beginning of file also automatically inserts the date each time you open the file so you can use it as a journal. I don't have access to Windows right now to test that though.

Indeed it does [0]

[0] - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/260563

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#27

Post by bpicolo »

cballard wrote: post #12
bpicolo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

138 rather, because of stripped space. Edit: Actually fewer because consecutive newlines are reduced to two. so like...2/3 * 140 roughly

I wasn't sure if that was client-side or server-side, and, if client-side, if the filtering is done at submit-time or display-time. I have seen someone tweet something with many sequential newlines, so I figured that it was probably client-dependent (I use Tweetbot).

Ah, not sure. You could certainly cheat in some ways with e.g. zero width characters probably

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#28

Post by chillingeffect »

I think this is a brilliant illustration of the "wear marks" around a basic service. At its core, it's still 140 chars, but each of these subtle deviations represents a bend in the direction of features valuable to users.

Developers and designers can benefit from this by not overspecifying how a technology is to be used until loads of feedback has returned. Kind of like the old story about the architect who didn't fill in the sidewalks until students had worn paths into the campus lawn :)

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#29

Post by mintplant »

blakeyrat wrote: post #21
mintplant wrote: post #6

> 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…

> I'm not sure whether this is shortsightedness on Twitter's part or "convenient" padding of their numbers. That's exactly the definition of the word "impression" for ad-serving systems.

Sure, but

- Twitter highlights impressions when it's a particularly useless metric for their platform. Why not expose uniques?

- Why include a user's own activity in their analytics data? Does anyone really want that?

- A tweet doesn't even have to appear on the screen to acquire an "impression". It could be far down the timeline and out of view, but as long as it's included in a batch in an API response, the counter goes up.

- This number is exposed to everyone, not just ad industry insiders, and is subtitled "number of times people saw this tweet" - but that's not what's counted.

The implementation may be technically correct, but it is, I think, misleadingly biased toward higher numbers. I can post a tweet and it can get 10 impressions in less than a minute, just from my clicking around. If I expand the tweet and click "reply" to attach another 140 characters, that's two "engagements". If I click a link to make sure it works, that's three. Honest values for those numbers would probably be zero.

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#30

Post by mintplant »

ktRolster wrote: post #11
mintplant wrote: post #6

> 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…

To be fair, that's more or less what an impression is. If you want "unique visits," you can look for unique visitors or unique impressions or just uniques, depending on what company you are working for. (And if you are doing TV, you can get an estimate of how many people saw it on DVR in the next three days)

True, however Twitter doesn't expose uniques at all, only impressions and "engagements", which also include your own activity. Hence the analytics tools they offer are "pretty but pointless".
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