Current location:	orlando
Current mood:	sore
Entry tags:	ajax, critique, twitter

Oh My Gawd twitter
So I signed up for this micro-SNS, which has been around for a couple years now. Being in the current web-dev industry, I must do a small critique.

Personally, I never sat down and looked at the thing until I signed up. A few hours afterwards a certain relation came to me, twitter reminded me of a little app of long ago, though social. I think its a good relation, but Taskpad was also inspired.

The Goods

• Multiple platform usage; SMS, IM, Web, and stand-alone client.
• Simple
• Very light, not a lot to configure (aka for users to fuck up) *coughMySpacecough*
• Msg size limit; overflow is visible on direct status viewing
  

The Negs

• Random AJAX performs an op, but there really isn't much else to do on the page.
• 140 character limit could have easily been the SMS standard of 160.
• The @ operator makes it feel like a chat, and doesn't quite conform to "What are you doing?" since one party will likely not fulfill the question. (suggest, blur better filtering)

These aren't really problems, cept for that AJAX one. I was sitting there waiting for the page to post, and it did its little javascript stuff, but once it was done, I had to refresh the page anyway, duh, not needed. Ajax is better for multiple/consecutive operations on a page, where it is saving more than one refresh. Still, twitter is quite the cool micro creature.

xry