The recent changes to Twitter's web and mobile interaces have not pleased everyone. John Gruber – as always – hits the nail on the head with the many user interface (UI) problems that have arisen in the new interface on mobile clients. The #NewNewTwitter app on my iPhone has also caused me to look elsewhere, and I'm currently trying out Tweetbot which I mostly like. Using a new mobile version of twitter has also caused me to reevaluate my desktop version of twitter which for a long while has been the official version from Twitter (which built on the excellent Tweetie app).
Twitterrific from The Iconfactory is a paid app which has very good reviews. It's normally $9.99 but is currently on sale at half price so I thought I'd give it a try. The must have feature that I need in any twitter client is the ability to support multiple accounts (I have seven accounts, many of which I use for various work-related projects). Apart from that, I like clients which have clean, attractive UIs and which have support for many keyboard shortcuts. So in these regards, how did I find twitterriffic? In a word...'unusable'. Here's why:
1) As with every other twitter client, direct messages that you send and receive can be viewed separately, but in twitterriffic they also appear as part of your main timeline view, mixed in with regular tweets. There is no way of turning this off and to me it feels wrong to have these messages mixed up with tweets.
2) You can press the left arrow key when a tweet is selected to display a new pop-up window. If your selected tweet is part of a conversation, the pop-up window shows the tweets in that conversation. If your tweet wasn't part of a conversation, you see recent tweets that mention the account of the tweet that you selected. But you have to use the escape key to close this window, no other key will make it disappear (you can also click elsewhere with a mouse). It would make sense to me to maybe make the window disappear by using the left arrow again, so you don't have to move your fingers. I don't like having to reach for the escape key (which requires a little bit of a stretch on most keyboards).
3) Unlike the aforementioned behavior of the left arrow key on regular tweets, pressing the left arrow on a direct message does nothing at all. You can't view direct messages as conversations. You can only view them a stream of all messages you've sent/received to/from everybody. If you message a lot of people then this makes it really hard, if not impossible, to go back and read the conversation. I can't understand why they can enable a conversation view on tweets but not on direct messages.
4) The sidebar (which you can turn on with Cmd + L) has a clear section heading for 'Lists', but the section heading for saved searches is just a search box. The main account section (All Tweets, Mentions, Messages, Favorites) has no heading. This all seems a little inconsistent. You can also add a fourth section 'Trends' that also has a section heading, but this section can only be turned on via the preferences and is off by default. Why not make each one a preference and give each one a consistent heading?
5) If you receive a new mention or direct message it is not always clear that this has happened. You can turn on Growl notifications, which helps, but otherwise you may just notice that the twitterriffic menu bar icon has turned blue. This indicates that something is new, but what? The menu bar icon does not have a menu to reveal what the new item is (e.g. a mention vs a direct message) or which account they have appeared in. If you turn on the sidebar (see previous item), you might hope that the 'Mentions' or 'Messages' sections would display in a different color to draw your attention to what is new. But alas, this doesn't happen. So for someone like me with many accounts, I have to search through each account in turn, checking to find out what is new.
6) You can 'jump' to your next twitter account using the Cmd + J keyboard shortcut, but unlike other twitter apps, you can only navigate forwards. So again, if you have many different twitter accounts you need to use this shortcut several times if you just want to to go to the previous account. There is a toolbar icon that allows you to switch to different accounts, but that requires using the mouse.
7) The menu bar icon sometimes turns blue and sometimes it animates – I should add that I find the animation somewhat distracting. However, sometimes it doesn't turn blue but it still animates. The only way I found out what these changes signify was by contacting Twitterriffic. There was no documentation explaining the differences. It turns out that the animation indicates that the account is being refreshed. Maybe that is obvious to others, but it wasn't so to me. Twitterriffic also told me that sometimes it doesn't stop animating which is a known bug.
8) A menu item (and keyboard shortcut) exists for something called 'Next Timeline'. This just moves you from a view of 'All tweets' to a view of your 'Mentions', then to 'Messages', and finally to 'Favorites'. Only the first of these is actually a timeline as defined by twitter so this terminology is confusing. Also, the keyboard shortcut that performs this action is the only shortcut that solely relies on using just Control as the modifier key (Ctrl + `). I'm not sure how many people have a need to cycle through these views in this order. Especially when twitterriffic also provides the – seemingly now standard – keyboard shortcuts of Cmd + 1, Cmd + 2 etc to jump directly to each of these views.
9) When you mouse over any tweet, two small icons appear in the bottom right. The first is an arrow which, if clicked, gives access to retweeting, replying to, or direct messaging the author of the tweet. The second 'gears' icon gives you various options, including favoriting the tweet. I'm surprised that favoriting a tweet doesn't merit it's own star icon in the tweet itself, rather than adding this as a buried function of the generic gears icon.
10) Twitterriffic uses color to distinguish between different types of tweet. If you use the 'light' color scheme then you may see the following colors:
Pale grey/blue - a regular tweet from someone else
Green - tweets that you have written
Dark orange - mentions (i.e. someone replies to you)
Light orange - quoted mentions (i.e. someone quotes your tweet)
Light blue - direct messages
All tweets also appear in a darker hue when selected (which is expected). So this means that it is possible that one window could contain six tweets all in different colors (assuming that one of the tweets is selected). I'm not sure if this is just too much visual information to process and comprehend. Maybe this is something that just takes time to get used to.
Conclusion
It is possible that I am alone in being irked by all of the above items. I'm just surprised that for such a well-regarded application, there seems so many elements of the UI which appear inconsistent and confusing. I have only been using Twitterrific for less than 24 hours, but it will not be getting any more usage out of me. I'm probably going to go back to the official Twitter app, but not before giving Echofon a try.
I was at last work last Friday and was very curious as to what would happen as the hours counted down to the 3:00 pm deadline; the time by which protestors had been asked to remove the tents from the UC Davis Quad.
I was tempted to go along to see what would unfold, but opted to stay at work. Physical separation, however, is no real barrier to being present at events these days. As the UC Davis police moved on to the Quad, there was semi-live coverage through the twitter accounts of Justin Cox (@DavisCAPatch), the Davis Enterprise (and @Cory_Golden in particular), and The California Aggie (@CaliforniaAggie). The former twitter account offered a link to a live video stream. I was able to listen to this but couldn't get a stable enough stream to watch. Here are some notable tweets that occurred on Friday afternoon, all of which I retweeted :
There were many more tweets about the events of that afternoon, but for a while things seemed to quieten down. At about 6:30 pm I cycled past the Quad and was surprised by how empty and quiet it was. I stayed in town to meet some friends for a little while but was home by 9:30 pm or so. That's when things started to take off. It became clear that this story was gaining traction and I tweeted as much:
The Chancellor had sent her first email to the UC Davis community about 9:00 and I posted a copy on my blog for others to read. Over the course of Friday evening, the now infamous photos and videos of the pepper spraying started to go viral. At just after midnight I noticed that 'UC Davis' was a worldwide trending topic on twitter.
I had also been checking Google News to see who was picking up the story. On Saturday night there were only a handful (maybe <15) of news sources that were covering the story, and these were nearly all local (Californian). As soon as I woke on Saturday morning I checked again and by about 8:15 am, the number had risen to 40. By 10:30 am, that number had risen to 205.
I think it was about this time, that the videos of the pepper spraying incident really started to go viral. I didn't check too many more times during the day but by Sunday morning there was over 1,200 Google News items about it.
At this time it was now a fully-fledged International news item, with coverage from the likes of the BBC and Al Jazeera. At the time of writing this blog post (Sunday evening), the story is still on the front page of the BBC News website and Google News has almost 7,000 stories about the incident (and about the wider implications of what has happened).
It's been a little bit surreal to be living and working somewhere which has become the center of such a big story. I hope that people who had never heard about UC Davis before this weekend don't just remember the images of the police with the pepper spray, but rather that they remember the peaceful and non-violent nature of the protest. I also hope that everyone has watched the amazing scenes when Chancellor Katehi left the disrupted press conference on Saturday to walk to her car, and was met by an eerie quiet from hundreds of gathered protestors. Never has two minutes of absolute silence sounded so loud.
I love UC Davis and while I'm saddened by what has happened, I'm profoundly proud of the behavior of the protestors throughout. I hope that lessons are learned from the events of the last few days and that peaceful, non-violent protest will remain a viable option to all of those at UC Davis who want to have their voices heard.
I spent the last week in New York for the Biology of Genomes meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. This was my first experience at a large meeting where twitter was used extensively to cover the talks (using the #bg2011 hashtag). CSHL has a policy of speakers needing to give express permission for twitter coverage of their talks. Overall, there was broad support for this and maybe two-thirds to three-quarters of all speakers allowed people in the audience to follow the talks via twitter.
The overlapping strands of twitter commentary reminded me very much of the utility of high-coverage in DNA sequencing experiments. In such experiments you generate more sequence in order to get higher coverage, and in turn this means that it is more likely to get all parts of a genome represented. Conversely, low coverage regions of a genome sequence might contain sequences that have contradictory information. This is, I think, a fitting analogy for live tweeting at conferences. You ideally want to have many twitterers cover a talk so that all important points are represented (it can sometimes be hard to type and follow a talk simultaneously). I think we often had 3–4 people cover a talk at CSHL, but sometimes this went as high as 5–7 twitterers:
Such high coverage meant if one person misrepresented a point, it was usually clear what had been meant by reading all tweets from other twitterers. Sometimes the twitter coverage would stick to representing the broader topics covered by a talk, but sometimes there could be a lot of hard facts:
I was also impressed by people sometimes linking talks to other useful/relevant information on the web. This could be useful when there was material that was not allowed to be directly covered by people on twitter:
It didn't stop with just the talks, there was also good coverage of some posters:
I think more people may have joined in if there had been more power outlets available in the auditorium. It was heartening to see people tweet that they had awoken earlier on the other side of the country in order to follow the twitter coverage live!
The conference was mostly excellent, but I was disappointed in the large number of talks that overran their 15 minute slot. Maybe partly due to a lack of practice, but also I think the chairs of each session should take some responsibility for not setting a better example from the outset of the meeting. Some speakers heard the bell ring at the 15 minute mark and seemed to not take this as a signal to wrap things up; one speaker used the bell to announce that he would 'move on to part 2 of the talk'! Ideally, I think all conference venues should have a lights system where the speaker – and maybe the audience – can see a series of 'traffic lights' that change through green, amber, and red as the time runs out. Alternatively, just let the speaker see a large LCD display that shows the amount of time left. Conferences can seem long enough as they are, and when three-quarters of the talk overrun by a few minutes each it can all add up to a lot of extra time at a meeting (time that could better be spent networking).
I've been using twitter for about two years now and have very much enjoyed using the service. But after about a year, I decided that maybe I should separate out my interests into two separate accounts. This was because I was tweeting about a mixture of different things which I thought would have more clarity if separated into two non-overlapping streams. I.e.
'home stuff' - about my life, the town where I lived, things that inspire/enrage me, politics etc.
'work stuff' - about science, research, technology, gadgets, programming
In a limited way, this approach did sort of work and I think it enabled people the choice of opting to follow either account or both of them depending on their interest. However, after a year of trying this approach I kept on running into three main problems.
Some of my tweets 'crossed the divide' and would be equally applicable to either account
It was not always clear which account I should use to follow people with. If someone tweets about technology but also is from the town where I live, then which account should I use to follow them?
I would frequently tweet from the wrong account. This happened a lot!
So I finally decided that maybe it is easier just to have one primary account and if people became annoyed or bored by reading my diverse selection of tweets, then that was their problem and not mine. This led me to do a Google search (which is also the title of this post) which quickly revealed that Twitter doesn't provide any tools to do this. So here is what I've done to achieve a merged account:
There are two things that need to be done. You need to make sure that your main account is following everyone that your secondary account was following (this is the easier part), and then you need to try to get everyone that was only following your secondary account to follow your main account instead (this is the harder part).
You can use a tool like TweepDiff to see what followers you have in common between the two accounts. In my case, I had about 600 followers to my main account, 250 followers to my secondary account, with about 100 of those followers common to both accounts.
I logged into twitter on the web using my main account and then made sure I was viewing the following page of my secondary account. I.e. my main account is @kbradnam and my secondary account was @7T1 so I logged into twitter as @kbradnam and then went to this page: http://twitter.com/#!/7T1/following
I then went through every person that @7T1 was following and then started following them with my main account (this may take some time, but it's still relatively painless)
At this stage, you can use just one account to follow everyone that you were following previously using two accounts
You will still need to keep your secondary account active for some time. That's because you will need time to use your secondary account to actively promote the fact that you will no longer be using it. You should log into your secondary account, and change your twitter bio description so that it effectively says 'Don't follow me, follow this other account instead'.
Then maybe 3–4 times a day, send a tweet to your secondary account that asks people to follow your main account. Maybe asking is a little bit pushy, so you can just point out that you are no longer using the account.
I found that each tweet to my secondary account that announced the decision to merge accounts would only result in a few people deciding to follow my main account (this is from the pool of people who were only following my secondary account). This reflects the truth that – stand by for huge shock – people don't read all of your tweets and will miss many of them.
The following graph shows the change in the number of twitter followers to both of my accounts over the last two years. In the last few days, there has been a noticeble change to both accounts. But I still have over 200 people following my secondary account and three quarters of those are not following my main account. Clearly the process of merging accounts will take some time, and it looks like I'm going to have to keep my secondary account for a little while longer yet. And of course at some point you'll need to accept that some people don't want to follow your main account.
Today I hit 200 followers on my secondary twitter account (@7T1). Woot! This account is not yet a year old and was started in order to keep some separation between the different things that I tweet about. In a nutshell, the @7T1 account is for science and technology related stuff. This includes a lot of stuff about gadgety subjects such as Apple and Android, but also coverage of another of my pet subjects: Unix and Perl. In contrast, my main twitter account (@kbradnam) is really for everything else. In particular, I tweet quite a lot about the lovely town where I live. As the following graph shows, my main account has been growing at almost twice the rate as my secondary account.
I'm okay with that because I probably tweet twice as much with my @kbradnam hat on as I do when using my @7T1 account. Notice also that the growth of @7T1 has been much smoother than @kbradnam. I'm not quite sure why this is. I imagine that twitter is getting a bit better at blocking spam-related accounts these days and maybe they have fewer large-scale purges of dubious accounts. If you look at the early growth of @kbradnam, you will see that it flatlines for a little while before growing again. This period coincided with the month that I gave up using twitter and facebook. This suggests that you need to keep on tweeting to gain followers.
There is some, but not too much, overlap between the followers of these accounts. Using the twtrfrnd.com site, I can see that there are 58 people who follow both accounts. This means I have a net following of 704 users. This still wouldn't change my position in the list of Top Davis Twitter Users though. Having two accounts can sometimes be a pain as a) I sometimes post from the wrong account and b) there are some tweets which I think would appeal to the demographics of both accounts. I try to not cross-post to both accounts at once, but very occasionally I will do so.
Thanks to everyone who follows me (either version of me that is). I hope that at least some of my tweets are found to be informative and/or entertaining. If my tweeting 'career' were to come to a sudden end (perhaps due to a bizarre gardening accident), I think that I could rest easy knowing that at least I gave the world #cheesenews.
