The sequence of events that inspired this micro-drama is as follows: Firstly, Jakob Nielsen decided to talk about iterative designs in tweets (or as he likes to dress them up: “stream-based postings”). He guides us through a process where in only five easy steps he has drained the blood from a sample tweet, leaving a dried husk that will rise in thirteen days to join the legions of humorless drones that find the useit.com design both fascinating and useful.

After this, Jeff Croft cuts through the meat of Jakob’s ‘findings’ with a tweet that probably did not require five iterations: “An article by Jacob Nielsen on how to take all the spontaneity and humaneness out of your tweets in five easy steps…”

Granted, at least one iteration more might have helped in his case to get Jakob spelled right.

The fact is, Jeff hit it on the head. If you’re writing down your tweets and re-writing them repeatedly to maximize some sort of marketing message, you’re not tweeting. I’m not sure what you’re doing, but I’ll bet that most people that see the message can see what it is, canned artificial crap. You don’t have a medium of micro-messages just to waste all the time and effort of a proper e-mail or blog post on a single sentence. Spending that effort on the message not only is contrary to the purpose of the medium, it’s counterproductive when the end result is what Nielsen presents, complete with shouting-style caps, months in parentheses, and different wording to make it “punchier.”

I’m going to say Jakob Nielsen does not know what “punchier” actually means. If he did, useit.com might not look like a canary got stuck in a mid-90′s school administration newsletter.

Tweet how you like, but if you spend a half-hour at a time maximizing your tweets in some sort of business formula, don’t be surprised when people stop paying attention to your massaged marketing attempts.

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.

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.

I also saw Star Trek. It was good. It was better than good. Go watch it, you’ll love it. I promise.

As it stands, I’ll take a swing or two in his place. First, let me direct you to today’s comic featuring Andy Clarke, wherein a couple of cheap shots are made at Opera’s expense. Then, continue reading.

First, I’m aware that browser usage statistics are like a dark art, much akin to necromancy and astrology, where accuracy isn’t really achievable. But the fact is (and take a look at Wikipedia’s page on the topic) that Opera according to some of these browser usage sources does in fact have less users than Netscape.

That’s right, there’s still people using Netscape. How scary is that? I wonder if they think grunge is alive and watch reruns of Family Matters while downloading websites on 14kbps modems. And just to reiterate, there’s more of these people (according to some sources) than there are people using Opera.

Beyond that, Google Chrome is the new hot browser in town and has already exceeded Opera’s user base in less than a year. That’s right, less than a year.

Look, I’m not saying it’s the number of users that count. After all, IE6 is utter rubbish and it’s still being used by too many people out there. What I am saying is that instead of wasting your company’s public image whining about the fact that Microsoft is doing us all a favor and forcing IE8 updates over their update system, you could be spending time looking at your own browser and figuring out why among other things a browser that has been dragged along for a decade by AOL then finally shot in the head (aka, Netscape) still has more users than your product.

Instead of making absurd suggestions that your competition serve your product via their update service, maybe you could look at Google Chrome and devise how it so rapidly out-paced you in such a short period of time?

Microsoft’s browser, even its newest version, isn’t even close to the coolest browser on the market. I don’t like Internet Explorer, and I only use it to check website compatibility in my job. But I don’t use Opera either, and that’s because (among other reasons) it has thus far convinced me (and the rest of the world) that it’s not worth the effort of installing and using rather than Firefox, or Safari, or the other web standards-compliant browsers on the market. It’s enough to make me wonder why we consider Opera part of the Big Four (now the Big Five). At this rate, with even terminated browsers giving Opera a run for the money, should we expand that name to the Big Six?

Is Opera a good browser? Yes. If that’s not the reason that it’s being ignored, than what is? Perhaps a lack of add-on support. I’ve always felt that Opera’s too busy telling people how to surf the web, and not spending enough time figuring out the features people want. Firefox isn’t popular on accident.

But I’ll tell you the number one reason why I don’t use Opera. It’s because of the company’s public behavior with their legal actions and petulant whining. The rank-and-file employees are talented people creating a worthwhile (albeit, not standout) product. But the big shots on top cost the company their credibility every time they make a cheap, transparently spiteful shot at the current market leader.

And lest I let the others off the hook, shame on Mozilla and Google for getting involved with the EU nonsense. Focus on your products, not on begging the government to get people to install your browsers for you.

For anyone who’s new to the fray, this is basically what’s going on: As most of you know, popular social services like Twitter exist. Twitter uses TinyURL as a shortener for URLs tweeted to help keep character counts down. Third party shorteners, while convenient, pose the threat of someday going under. This will result in millions of hyperlinks on the Internet that would no longer work, causing link rot. As we all should know, link rot is bad.

Those taking the long picture, such as Jeremy Keith (who’s view of the long picture is much more than most considering his thoughts of concepts such as the Long Now, which is even farther ahead than I can even bother thinking about), are already suggesting solutions today to prevent link rot from killing the Internet’s usefulness in that grim day when these shorteners disappear. One such solution is rev=”canonical”, which Jeremy has discussed at least twice now. It seems like a reasonable option, and far preferable to a rabble of links that rot with no backup plan attached.

Now, by and large the resulting debate hasn’t been whether short url-related link rot is a problem. The real argument is whether the proposed solution’s use of rev is somehow confusing, or whether good alternatives already exist, etc. However, hidden throughout these discussions are little comments like this one from Shelley Powers:

I hate to break it to the folks so worried, but it will probably be a cold day in hell before anyone digs into Twitter archives. Most of us can’t keep up with the stream of tweets we get today, much less worry about yesterday’s or last week’s.

I don’t think that Shelley is actually trying to say “there is no problem,” but I can’t help but feel that the comment is fairly short-sighted, and reflective of a certain prevailing mindset that the issue at hand isn’t largely a serious one because of the medium that’s most exposed: Twitter and other social networks. After all, we each have our own blogs, right? All the smart people on the web are home-brewing their own websites, correct?

I think we sometimes forget how we, as developers, represent a small subset of the Internet’s population. And that in addition to our own blogs and sites we use these services ourselves. The fact is, I like to favorite tweets to follow important links later. If I follow someone interesting, I’m inclined to dig through their past posts to see interesting things they’ve talked about. The first hit on Google for “Kyle Weems” that is me (and not a basketball player or yo-yo champion) is (for better or worse) my Twitter account. Heck, the vast majority of my site’s non-direct traffic comes from links via Twitter, some of which are months old. Regardless of what you think of the quality of these networks, they generate a large amount of content and connect to a lot of content elsewhere. If suddenly all the links went dead, it would kill off a great deal of the web’s existing site-to-site traffic.

So although I’ve yet to build my own URL shortener, I clearly think it’d benefit me to do so because URL shortening is a problem that will affect me (and the rest of us) negatively in the future if we continue to use third party shorteners. Although I don’t know if rev=”canonical” is the proper solution, I think we need to ensure that we focus on a quick implementation of something. Even if the functionality to make use of it isn’t there yet, coding for it now will prevent more headaches later. The pace at which new links are being generated each day is staggering, and the sooner we turn things around, the less tragic the zombie link apocalypse will be for us all.

So who to believe? Time, I’m thinking, as it proves more accurate than any pundit’s predictions. What I find interesting is the gut reaction by many (including myself) that Google buying our favorite little micro-whatever service would be a bad thing. I don’t know why that is, maybe some sort of fear of the mega-giant absorbing the entire Internet and branding it with rainbow text. Yet, I’ll admit, they’ve done right by me so far. Their search, maps, mail, rss reader, analytics and news services are all tools I use daily. They clearly are providing me with content access that matters to me. So why am I unhappy with the idea of them handling 140 character text messages?

Maybe I’ll never know. But I do know one man who has very concrete reasons for disliking the idea of an acquisition: Doug Bowman. Once designing for Google, he recently parted with them due to a number of reasons involving dozens of shades of blue, and has moved over to design for Twitter. I can only imagine how horrible it’d be to finish setting up your desk to find that you don’t have to change your business cards at all.

Today’s comic documents such a tragic incident.

[Edit: As noted in the comment below, Kara Swisher corrected me in stating that what she was in fact saying was that Google is not in any late-stage talks for acquiring Twitter, as opposed to "not buying Twitter". It was my mistake in misinterpreting her point. Check out the link in her comment for more from her on that topic, though.]

It’s been an observed impact of the Internet that people generally are much more impatient when it comes to searching for data. If you can’t Google it or Wikipedia it in under five minutes, then the information doesn’t exist or isn’t worth knowing.

It seems to me at the very least that Twitter is doing the exact same thing to my ability to write at length about any topic. I could devise a narrative about my recent exploration of the topic of RDFa and talk at length of my conclusions regarding its impact on future web development… or I could come up with 140 characters or less to the effect of “RDFa is sort of like XFN. But not. At what point is extra semantic markup too much bloat?”

The trick is staving off the need for instant gratification in exchange for the fulfillment I get from a more carefully considered writing that covers the topic in more depth. I think that sums up Internet use in general these days.

Alright, fess up. How do you fight your Twitter addictions?

My very first thought? “Dude, I should tweet this.”

I then proceeded to try to access Twitter, first from my computer, then next from my iPhone.

A few moments later my brain kicked in just a bit “Oh… right.”

Where do you post complaints, snarky comments, or short hilarious thoughts when you’ve got no web access? The fridge?

Sometimes I think that any thoroughly web-integrated person is like a wireless cyborg, incapable of functioning properly without web access. If you put me in Amish country, I’d probably lose the ability to speak coherently.

This one isn’t a deep commentary on corporate hypocrisy or a glam shot of Andy Clarke in his knickers, sorry.

Ultimately, I like the Twitter service. Although I don’t know if it’s best described as “micro-blogging”, “shopping list”, or “mutual voyeurism”, it’s an interesting service that lets you update details of your life or clever thoughts with a minimum of time investment. The 140 character limit helps provide limitations for people (like myself) who’d rather blather on about an inane topic for paragraphs.

I wonder if we could get politicans to do their talking in this fashion? It’d save us a lot of time.

The main problem with the service, which Twitter has become infamous for, is the tendancy of their whole server to buckle on a daily basis. I’ve come to expect it to be in an afternoon state of shock when I get back to the studio after lunch. It’s so predictable, it’s sad. I can’t help but wonder at this point what desperate straights they must be going through to reverse this trend… and this week’s comic is my theory on that topic.

And now, back to the rest of the world of web development.

Twitter is a fun, useful service. But if it allows itself to become a place where harassment (pretty lewd stuff, at that) is allowed, then I can’t imagine it’ll stay in use forever. Wake up, guys, you need to protect your users.

[Edit: Two new things I've learned since this entry went up. First, Arial is part of the Pownce team. While I won't say outright that working for the competition could have been a factor, it does bring the validity of the situation into question. Secondly, as Twitter team members stated, both sides of the story hadn't been told and they offer their viewpoint of the situation here. I don't know what to make of the situation, but it's clear that if harassment is happening that Twitter needs to follow up on their threats and ban such people.]