Posted on September 19, 2008 - by Mike Panic | Visited 1021 times, 2 so far today

Twitter redesigns interface, still somewhat unstable

While going through the RSS feeds this morning, I saw a great write-up on CNET about the interface redesign on Twitter.  Great in that, it’s well written and covers all the positive points, but it seems that Twitter has pushed more emphasis on making their web app look pretty as opposed to actually stable.

Here’s a summery of what is new and changed:

• Smaller tabs that were on top of the timeline to the right sidebar, where they can occupy more space, making them larger clicking targets. They also moved the following/followers/updates stats to the top of the page and made them larger, so now I can really see how deflated my follower numbers are.
• The most important change, in terms of functionality is the addition of AJAX to the “Home” and “@Replies” pages. Their new implementation allows you to refresh the items in your timeline without having to reload the whole page.
• New design customizer with this release, which allows you to change the colors on your Twitter profile with the help of a color wheel.

Great, new ways to make it look pretty, but still barely works properly.  I’ve been using Twitter on and off for a year now (follow me at twitter.com/mikepanic) and while I did manage to crack 12,000 text messages by subscribing to some major news outlets and having them sent SMS to my cell phone, most of what I’ve found is that it’s just noise, even from people I know in real life.  For more than 3 months now I haven’t had tweets coming into my cell, I’m very happy about this and do not miss it one bit.  I also rarely go to the official Twitter site, rather I use Twitterific on my Mac to read and update tweets.

What is most frustrating, outside of the noise and constant “read my new blog post” tweets that I myself am guilty of sending is the lack of stability.  The service seems to be going down, still, several times a month.  How can I stand behind and love an app just because it’s pretty looking when it isn’t stable?

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