The Danosphere.

I’m stooped in code right now refactoring the entire code-base for http://snipt.org in preparation for some huge new features, but I came across this and had to share. A ~45min Q/A with Conan O’Brien on Google campus. Needles to say- it is very funny. Probably some of Conan’s best internet related comedy yet.

Oprah is now on twitter. Oh, my, gurd.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing??

Alot of my fav people over @tcbn have been getting on the Twitter train, which I highly encourage as tcbn2.0 may feature some solid twitter integration [hint]- more on that later. At first sight twitter is a strange and confusing place, and can really leave you wondering “wtf is this?”. Well, here are my tips for new users to jump right into the twittosphere instead of just walking around the edges in confusion. Oh and make sure to follow me and follow the tcbn twitter account too!

One more thing, post a link to your twitter account on your blog or website, its how I have found most the TCBN tweeps,  no one is going to find you if you don’t advertise just a lil

This week Digg released their “Diggbar” which also seconds as a URL shortening service. What this means for the end user… or more importantly the content generating users whose content is submitted to digg by other people is that- now Digg is stealing your traffic!

Mashable was quick to give Digg the ole’ reach-around, making it sound so soft and cuddly! But the truth is that Digg is milking traffic from other sites, without their permission at all. How much traffic are they stealing? Enough to boost their 20million unique visitors by about 20%. On top of all that (as if that isn’t enough) they also inject ads into the diggbar frame, so they are stealing views AND revenue from the sites that are shared via their shortened URL.

I could go on for ages about how much that sucks for the sites losing traffic and ad revenue to digg, or about how crappy shortened URLs are for the web, or about how the diggbar is killing SEO for sites framed by it, but luckily someone has already done that for me.

Want the truth? Here is it:

The Truth about Digg’s DiggBar

I’m pleased to announce Snipt.org the twitter-based code sharing service is growing into much more. Today the Snipt.org API was released along with a number of other features including an AIR App, AS3 Library,  and Wordpress Plugin (which I’m using on this site!). Hopefully we will see some cool implmentation of the API in the near future (Textmate hint hint). To check out all the goodies head to Extending Snipt.org.

While I was having lunch with my buddy and fellow twitterer @wittyphrase we got to discussing twitter, and that naturally led to discussing tweetdeck, one of the most popular twitter clients to date. Tweedeck is a great tool for organizing and managing your twitter life, but it could be better, here are a few suggestions.

Replace “Mystery Meat” Navigation

What do these buttons do? Can you tell? I couldn’t, and it took me about a week to get used to the fact you have to roll over each button in order to discern its function. I think useability would increase by making the functions of the buttons more apparent, even if that means adding a label to the right of the button or whatever (or replacing the icon with a label).

Time Format

I am not in the military, and thus 24hr time does not instantly correlate to 12hr time for me. Also, I don’t like doing math. It would be nice if the time format were configurable so I could choose between 12 and 24hr time formats.

Group Memory

I use tweetdeck both at home and at work. It is pretty annoying that when I get home, I need to “regroup” all the tweeps I had seperated into groups at work. If there was some persistence of the groups across machines that would be incredibly useful.

Drag and Drop

Because I am a Flex Developer, I can tell you right now tweedeck was built in Flex, which is cool. I can also tell you drag and drop is very easy to implement in Flex and would be a huge useability plus for tweetdeck. Being able to drag columns around and drag users to and from groups would be much easier than the current process which involves clicking alot of buttons and checking a lot of checkboxes.

Filtering

If I have created a group and added tweeps to it, I don’t need to also see their tweets repeated in my “All Friends” column. If a person is in a group, omit their tweets from the main timeline, or at least make it an option, its rather cumbersom seeing the same tweet in different columns.

More About Me

Tweetdeck doesn’t tell me much about myself. It would be nice if it showed my avatar in the top right along with my API stats. Information on following/followers for my account would be nice as well, especially if it were realtime updated along with the rest of the UI. Right now I have to switch to the Twitter web interface to see new followers and that to me is a nuisance.

Make Tweetdeck Web Accessible

Tweetdeck is built on Flex and AIR, so it should be pretty easy to implement a straight web interface without the AIR wrapper. This would be especially useful if they implemented persisting groups, that way i could use tweetdeck from a webpage at the library and still have all my tweeps neatly organized into groups, and I wouldn’t have to download any executables or runtime environments!

Conversation View

It would be nice if tweetdeck allowed you to break conversation out of the main column somehow. Not really sure what the best way to implement this would be, but tracking back through a converstation using tweetdeck is not always the easiest thing. Showing a conversation similar to the way twitter search does would be very useful.

——————-

That’s all I got, if you have more ideas please post them up in the comments. I really like Tweetdeck, but its the lil things that keep me waiting for “the next great client” that will address all these issues and truly serves as my one stop twitter shop.

Oh, Kevin Rose told me to do this: Follow me on Twitter!