Incremental Blogger

With the recent chatter about the growing popularity friendfeed, I’ve been questioning whether it’s really worth it to try to add features to a twitter client (web page thumbnails, ink, and so on). After all, isn’t the current action over on friendfeed?

Yeah, for the leading edge folks I might be a little late to the game here. But oh well, I still think that for those of us who use twitter’s service that a better client will make it even more useful.

Also, twitter is a baseline communication service and outside of friendfeed’s commenting ability, friendfeed is more an aggregator. Two different animals.

But what does all this mean, for instance, if you want to draw a cartoon for instance and share it with others. In a sense, posting a drawing to flickr and relying upon friendfeed for others to see and comment upon it is not a bad idea. It avoids people having to broadcast particular items here or there on twitter. Maybe the self-selection on twitter is a good thing though. It sure cuts down on traffic. Of course, friendfeed doesn’t have an inking panel for drawing anything and posting it so for creating comic content friendfeed isn’t going to hack it.

On the other side, I also can see that friendfeed does a pretty job with listing videos. In fact, looking at what people share on twitter and what you see on friendfeed–at least for the people I follow–there are a lot more people interested in videos that what twitter lets on. This kind of suggests how twitter’s text-only mindset is maybe too limiting.

Well, back to my original question: Is it worth it to keep dabbling with a twitter client? Hmmm. At least a little bit more. If the growth continues on the friendfeed side though, it may simply be too late.

Now that I have the site preview thumbnails working better in Witty, it’s easy to see how often people refer to web pages in tweets.

For instance, out of the last 20 tweets I’ve followed, almost 50% (9) have urls in them.

(I’m thinking though, that I need to make my thumbnails a little smaller. With so many thumbnails, they eat a lot of space as it is.)

I’m at the point where I need to deicide about a couple features with the twitter client.

First, should I break the 140 character limit? Here’s what In thinking: Should a twitter client allow the user to type more than 140 characters and then if they’ve typed let’s say 200 characters then the client automatically splits the oversized message into two messages and then auto re-assemble them in the client into one message?

Yep, this violates the basic intent of twitter and most clients would not see the coalesced, single tweet, but for those that could, wouldn’t this be a compelling feature?

Maybe if you want to say more you should always link rather than tweet text.

Or similarly what if you want to write something and you’ve consumed 143 characters? Should a twitter client give you a suggestion window with edited permutations that fit within 140 characters? Auto-magically? Or is this type of feature too much effort for too little gain?

The other thing I’m thinking about is about ink editing, text tweets can’t be edited, but since the ink is placed on flick, maybe allowing editing for it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Now if irk editing is supporter, what does it mean? Should you be able to do tiny adjustments or simply replace the whole thing? Or both?

This is why I want to be able to tweet in ink and see image previews in my twitter client…

I want to be able to draw silly cartoons and share them easily… or better yet see other people’s GOOD cartoons as I scan through my tweets.

As I read this morning through some of the people I follow on Twitter using my tweaked Witty that displays web page thumbnails for urls mentioned, I can’t help but wonder if maybe these thumbnails are…hmmm…too big?….provide enough information?….need to be layed out differently?

It is kind of interesting how many people are mentioning URLs though today–especially using tiny links of some kind.

Bob was suggesting that rather than these web page thumbnails that we go with a tooltip that shows the actual site url. That would at least give the idea of where the tiny url points to without paying the performance hit of retrieving the web page thumbnail for the url or having to deal with its rendering issues. After playing with the thumbnails for a little under two hours I’m giving this more thought–at least as an option.

Next up? I want to be able to past images into the InkCanvas and be able to mark them up with ink. Hmmm….