The Warm Glow of Twitter

There's a topic of discussion making the rounds in the twitterverse: How do we explain twitter to other people? This is not a new topic. Indeed, there is a very very common pattern for joining twitter.

FAIL

Everyone tells you to try it, so you do, and you use it, and you post a message something like "Everyone says I should use twitter, so I am. Trying to figure out what the deal is." And then: Nothing happens. Because none of your friends use twitter.

If you're lucky, some of your friends join, and you pull through, and everybody loves it. Or you find out about some famous people who use it, you follow them, build up your following list, and you see the light. But it takes time, and for everyone I know, there's a stretch where it's not working and you just don't get it.

Call it The Twitter Gap.

Answering the Wrong Question

Once you're in, you want everyone you know to be in. There is a direct correlation between percentage of people you know who twitter, and the pleasure you get in using it. So you give them the Pitch. You tell them how to use the service, how it works, and then you do the little song and dance where you compare it to other services. It's a mini-blog. It's like a forum. It's like a series of IM away messages. It's like public SMS. Whatever.

None of our analogies are convincing. We are talking about How It Works, and nobody cares about How It Works. Most of us who use Twitter right now are technical people. Understanding and discussing how technical systems work makes us all happy inside.

The Right Question

But what normal people want to know is "How will this make my life any better?" There's nothing obvious about publicly available 140-character messages. Nothing that screams "You must use this thing!" Nobody buys a car because it contains an internal combustion engine that drives four wheels, can be steered, and may have a radio.

People buy cars because cars make them feel free. Or because they can go to anything, in any weather, at anytime, with little effort. People own cars because it connects them to the people, places, and things they care about, without the physical strain.

LIkewise, nobody uses Google because you type a set of words into a text box and you get back (hopefully) relevant web pages. People use Google because at any time, you can access any information you can think of. Any question can be answered in about 10 seconds.

So the real question is: Why do we use twitter?

How It Feels to Use Twitter

We use twitter because of how it feels.

Let's assume you pull through The Twitter Gap. You have a healthy set of people you follow, and you are comforted to know that a bunch of people follow you. Most people using Twitter these days are pretty plugged in. So they probably have twitter on their phone and thus post and read regularly.

The end product of twitter is a long list of short messages from people you know, like, love, and/or admire. Think of the hundred little moments on your own on a normal day. Standing in line at the grocery store. Waiting for some form of transportation. Pausing at work. Waiting to meet somebody. Waiting for the S.O. to come back from the restroom. Waiting for a meeting to begin.

Now take those lost moments, and inject perhaps half a dozen comments, some witty, some interesting, some utterly boring, from the people in your life. Whether the comments are worthwhile or meaningful is secondary to the fact that they're there at all.

Further, no one is jostling for your attention. No bells ding (unless you want them too.) There's no phone to feel guilty for not answering. There's no email to carefully craft. There's no IM to coordinate. Twitter just sits there. When you're ready, it sends along your snippets of text.

Queue the Sappy Music

Twitter is a button you can push at any time that reminds you that there are wonderful people in the world doing wonderful things, some of whom you know and care about, and who care about you. It's like the notes your mother would leave in your lunchbox. You find the note, and you think of mom, and you think of her kindly assembling your lunch. And you feel Good.

Now imagine those little notes dropping in at any moment of the day, but only on command, and from everyone you know. It's like a sinewy thread, weaving through the day, connecting the moments between actual connection with little reminders that the connections are there.

So that's my twitter pitch. I think that nice little feeling is why we twitter users are always bugging you about it and blogging about it, over and over and over.

I promise not to blog about this again. If you're interested in tuning into Radio Andre, you may do so here. You don't have to join to follow along. It just makes things easier.

The War On Legibility

Your browser contains two useful commands: Zoom In (or Make Text Bigger), and Zoom Out (or Make Text Smaller).

Question: When is the last time you opened up a web page and decided to Zoom Out? When was the last time you opened a web page and thought to yourself, "My god, this text is just too goldarn big."

I'm going to guess never, or at the most, rarely. I'm going to guess you only zoom in. Why? Because web developers like to make text small.

There are consequences to this fetish of the nano, and none of them are good news for the reader. Obviously, smaller text is harder to read. Even worse, small text tends to lead to long lines of text. It's much easier to read text when there are fewer words per line.

There is no reason for this nonsense. Both larger text and shorter lines are wins for the reader. It's time to get over Tiny Text Syndrome. Make your font size bigger.

A Web Interface Proposal

I would like to propose an interface rule for the web: Under no circumstances shall the mouseover event modify the layout of a web page. Period.

Moving the mouse about is a natural, indeed, an essential activity on a mouse-based GUI. The idiom is move around, click to act.

But on the web, this rule is regularly flaunted. We have our mouse over action, and we can do anything with it. When it comes to layout, this is a Bad Thing.

I'm particularly thinking of insidious dropdown navigation tools. Example: Inc. Magazine. Dropdown navs are particularly horrible because of how common it is to be at the top of a web page, wanting to move to the content area, but needing to pass through the navigation zone. So you trigger the nav, and content appears under your mouse. If you want to click a link under the resultant menu, you must zoom around, then return to do complete the task.

This is just awful.

I feel pretty silly writing this post, because the horrors of the design seem so manifest to me. And yet mouseovers flourish. I think it's time we as an industry band together, and consign layout-altering hovers to the dark, tawdry place where blink tags and scrolling marquees now live.

One notes it is still fair game to change cosmetic attributes on hover. But layout changes are for clicks.

Ha-Ha-Habari

Hey, look, it's my navel. Just a quick note for the interested that this weblog has made the move from WordPress to Habari.

The Tap Web

I've grown accustomed to the iPhone's Safari Touch browser, such that I find myself irritated when I can't use the double-tap-to-zoom-in technique on my desktop browsers.

Web pages are rarely organized with reading content as the sole priority. Content is a hook to expose you to links to even more articles, all of which contain ads. Indeed, on many web sites, consideration for the reader seems to be at the bottom of a very long priority list.

It's not hard to understand why. Readers expect a bottomless supply of written content at no cost. Someone needs to foot the bill, and advertisers are willing. Maximizing advertising means maximizing reader exposure to in-site material, and most readers are not going to look for more content unless their interest is actively tickled.

The end result is a web full of sidebars and banners only a circus promoter could love. I'm not even talking about the ads themselves, obnoxious though they can be. I'm talking about the intra-site promotions with busy layouts and in your face color schemes, crammed together in such a way as to make one think the world's white space supply ran out. Not that the ads are delightful, either.

Double Tap turns the situation significantly in favor of the user. Tap-Tap, and the website effluvia vanishes. All I see is The Article. No sidebars, no promos, no feature pimping, no widgets. Just the Thing I Came For. And once I've zoomed on my target, it's not like I'm going to zoom back out to See More Stuff. When I'm done, I'm done.

The experience is so different, it's like a different web altogether, the Double Tap Web. The thing is, all the concerns that led to the current situation on the Normal Web can be appeased on the Tap Web without the pain points.

The goal of information-based websites is simple: Be of interest to the reader, expose the reader to advertising, interest the reader in more content. Repeat.

The Tap Web can support ads. Anything can support ads. The Tap Web also supports self-promotion. At the end of the article, show me a list of related content that might be of interest. This technique is especially effective, because by reading a particular article, the reader has self-identified their interests, making it easier to target both ads and further content.

A site that has been particularly successful for me this way is Zen Habbits. I queued up a dozen articles just by jumping from one recommended link to the next. Call it the YouTube effect. Post-roll is a great place to put links. It's right when and where I'm open to something else to read.

If you aren't convinced, swap "The Tap Web" for "The RSS Web". If anything, Double Tap on the iPhone lets readers arbitrarily insert the user experience of an RSS aggregator into any web page. The difference being RSS is still catching on among non-techies, whereas the potential market for The Tap Web is iPod users. In other words, everybody.

If Apple plans on pushing the iPod Market in an iPod Touch/iPhone direction, and there can be no doubt this is the plan, millions of web readers will be viewing our web pages through a Tap-shaped lens. Which means millions of readers will be able to switch off our obnoxious promotion schemes.

And note that the ability to do so is nothing new. We the power users have been able to shape our web experience for a long time. The difference is that not only will general users have this ability, but in the context of a touch device, such ability will be necessary to even use the web. In short, users will be blocking our web administrative artifacts as a matter of survival.

I can't help wondering how great the regular web would be if it more closely resembled the Tap Web. In the least, I'd like to see an acceptance in major websites that while intra-site promotion is necessary for business, there's no reason this experience has to be so hostile to the reader. Too many links dilutes the value of each link.

Indeed, it may be that a more focused strategy to site promotion will lead to more internal reading, not less, and thus stronger attraction for advertisers. Especially if said readers are strongly targeted. More customers works as a strategy, but so do better customers.

Boon or boondoggle, the Tap Web is coming. Now would be a good time to think about how tap-friendly our sites are.