Over the weekend I moved to a new apartment. After this, it was Memorial Day on Monday. As a result, this week’s comic is a day late, and accompanied by only a brief post.

It wasn’t my intent to discuss Twitter back to back. After all, there’s all sorts of important web development topics just ripe for plunder. But I couldn’t pass this one up.

Twitter is working on a TV show. No, really. Or working with people working on a show. Whatever. I can’t imagine how I’d react to hearing this in person from one of Twitter’s higher-ups if I worked with them, although today’s comic attempts to recreate such a scenario. However, both Eric Meyer and Jeff Croft managed to craft suitable tweets that sum things up fairly well, here and here (respectively).

I appreciate the tool that is Twitter. I’ve kept in contact with people met elsewhere thanks to it, met new people with similar interests over it, and made good use of it in keeping up to date on interesting information in my industry. I’m not really sure, though, that a 140-character micro-blog requires a televised show.

About the only way you could jump the shark more is, well, to be Fonzi.

Seriously, why is he water-skiing in a leather jacket AND the shortest shorts ever? If this was cool in the 70′s, I’m glad I was only 3 when they ended.

If you’re one of the few people who read my blog but haven’t heard of Twitter, you may be unaware of the firestorm that started last week when the company decided to alter a feature of their service last week.

Today’s comic (featuring Biz Stone, Doug Bowman, and Eric Meyer with a Star Trek flair) pokes fun at the brouhaha that resulted. It also highlights the dangers of running any sort of social networking site and trying to make feature changes.

As the creators of Facebook have learned in the past, people have opinions. Build a site based on people sharing with one another, then make a change, any change, and you’re going to find that people are going to use your site to share negative opinions about those changes. If they’re loud enough, or numerous enough, you’ll find yourself suddenly struggling with an unanticipated PR disaster over what seems to be the most minuscule issues.

In this case, the big issue was Twitter deciding to remove the optional setting that allowed you to see a reply from one user to another, even if you weren’t following that other user (tweets known as conversational fragments). For quite some time Twitter has had the option of letting you hide those from yourself, so that your chattier friends’ conversations with strangers doesn’t drive you bananas.

However, removing this option angered the people who liked that feature, allowing for what they call “serendipitous discovery”. What better way, for example, to expand your list of industry colleagues that you get useful tips from then to watch who professionals in your field are talking to? (More than a few people now on my follow list I learned about from stalking the tweets of people like  Meyer and Andy Clarke).

To sidestep the limitation, in protest Eric Meyer (and many others) started adding > prior to every reply. The catch, of course, was that you couldn’t filter those out, so then suddenly everyone on Twitter was seeing a lot more replies than they actually used to when they had an option.

Thankfully, less than twenty-four hours later this was changed. Unfortunately, you now need a flow chart to determine how your tweets are being seen (here’s one by ReadWriteWeb.) I’m not even going to try to explain it, other than to say some of your replies are visible to others who choose to see them, and some aren’t.

I don’t understand why it was so important for them to make this change, nor am I sure that I understand their new compromise position. (Biz explains the issue more clearly here) What I do know is that any web service (especially a social networking one) should think twice (or heck, three times) before removing a feature from their service that users are actually using, and incapable of reproducing on their own through workarounds.

In one week, An Event Apart will be in Seattle. Seattle is less than a two hour drive from Bellingham, which is where Mindfly Web Studio is located and where I live.

It’s a gorgeous town. It’s also a bit too small to attract the conference circuit.

Having never been to An Event Apart, I would love to attend one that is so close. But the conference budget was used to attend the fabulous Web Directions North 2009 in Denver, and I’m additionally in the process of getting ready to move to a new apartment, so I can’t justify the expense.

Poor me. As tempting as it would be to go Annie Wilkes-style and abduct a presenter as today’s comic suggests (featuring Eric Meyer in the role of victim), I think I’ll pass on becoming a kidnapper and just cope with the disappointment.

However, along with a couple other Mindfliers, I am looking to see what interest there is in the local web developer community in forming a wagon train and crashing whatever social events are occurring in the evening after the conference stops for the day. Details are sketchy on who, how, or with what vehicles, but if you’re local, and you’re interested, feel free to start tweeting me about it.

The real debate is what day, and what venue. Perhaps some Seattleites or AEA organizers could shed some useful light into this? Monday seems like the right night, but the MT Opening Night party is likely an attendees-only event that would take up a huge chunk of the available social time, resulting in us Bellinghamsters crouching outside in some sort of tent city, hawking “Death to IE6″ wares and playing the bongos.

Actually, your average Bellinghamster doesn’t need an excuse to start playing drums and making hand-made necklaces. Things get a bit granola-esque up here.

Of course, even if I miss the event and it’s pool of attendees completely, I plan to haunt the web’s stream of useful notes, presentations, and articles that will pop up in it’s wake. I love that part of this industry.

Speaking of conferences, Jeremy Keith put up a blog post discussing his presentation at Bamboo Juice, which helps illustrate his impression of thinking long term (which I touched on in my last comic update). I’d like to point out in particular the line: “Think about what you would put on the gold disc attached to Voyager; now publish that material online.”

As of yet, I can think of nothing that I’ve ever generated as content, online, on paper, or otherwise, that deserves to take up space on a probe’s first contact disc. That is, unless topical humor about web standards counts as memorable. Which makes me wonder, what was humor like in Sumer? I can’t help but feel that largely the jokes wouldn’t translate well.

Eric Meyer wrote a little post about new project in development by John Resig called Sizzle that should be making every web designer wet themselves. He’s really excited about this. Almost to the point where in my mind’s eye I can see him skipping down hallways. How excited?

“I’m absolutely going to use it and recommend its use far and wide.”

Sounds pretty excited to me. What is all this enthusiasm being caused by? What is Sizzle?

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