I do most of my article gathering through Google Reader, which has a “share” option at the bottom of each article you read. If you follow me on Google, you probably get these articles in the “shared by others” category, but for those of you who don’t, I use the RSS feed of shared items that Reader puts out piped through an RSS to Twitter service (personally, I use TwitterFeed).

It’s not a perfect service, it will only push out articles every 30mins or so, but I find it more than adequate for my purposes. If something really great comes along and TwitterFeed isn’t an option, I sometimes push it out by hand to Twitter. And I actually think the 30mins delay is a good buffer so I don’t flood anyone’s Twitter stream with articles.

Google Reader also has a bookmarklet for things you want to share that’s outside your subscriptions. It’s very nice, I highly recommend it. You can get the RSS feed and “Note in Reader” bookmarklet from the “Share” tab down the left side of the page.

That’s how you get the Tweets formatted like “Currently reading” and “From CSSKarma”. I also recently hooked up Pandora, LastFM and YouTube to the services… so look out.

One of the great things about the folks at Twitter is that they really stick to what they’re good at and they let the community define what they want out of the service. So much so that they’ve responded with some really great community-driven Twitter services.

MySpace

The downfall of MySpace started when users were given too much control in design their profiles. Then the spam started pouring in like crazy. Everyone had a MySpace account, even corporations, and they were all collecting “friends”. Profiles became bloated and ugly; and shortly after that, a viable alternative came along and users started migrating over to Facebook in an attempt to flee the spam.

Facebook

Facebook solved the MySpace design problem by removing that level of control from the users. Then (maybe to make up for it) they opened up to customizations through user-created applications. And the downward spiral began, yet again.

Users began abusing the apps and we were all subject to invites to Mafia teams and Vampire squads.

It’s gotten so bad that I can’t log into Facebook without some sort of asinine notification or spam coming from one of these wonderful apps generated by the “community”. You know there’s no way Facebook will step in and take control of the apps, so we just have to find ways around them as they add in (false sense of) security features.

Unfortunately, when we look at these 2 monsters of social networking, it appears that the problems all start with giving users too much control.

Do they actually want control?

Where’s the problem? Is it a perception of the user? Or is it that I’m way off base here, and the user actually wants a web site they can be totally engulfed in all day long? I’m not convinced users want the amount of control sites like Facebook and MySpace give them.

I know millions of people use Facebook apps, but maybe they’re just using them because they’re available. I don’t get the feeling that if all these apps never existed anyone would really care. I didn’t hear anyone complain about lack of control in Facebook before the apps came along; not a single person.  They were just happy to get out of MySpace.

Look at what Twitter’s done so far:

• They’ve stripped down user profiles – no one cares
• They gave you very controlled design options – there’s been no outcry
• The pretty much made your personal Twitter page useless – I’m not even sure anyone has noticed
• They allow almost anyone to follow your updates – so what?

If anything, the Twitter model is showing us users just want some core functionality. They really don’t want a place they can list their favorite books, movies and TV shows; it’s all just fluff.

Telling the user no

Twitter’s found a way to let us know that what we want isn’t a priority for them. And by using a “Do it yourself” attitude and releasing a well thought out and flexible API, we love them for it. It’s a little twisted, but it’s working really well. They’re picking and choosing what users have requested they want to address.

By releasing an API with so many options Twitter’s essentially hired thousands of developers for free to build add-ons to their site that are completely independent from Twitter (that have nothing to do with pirates OR vampires). And it allows them to really focus on features they think are important like search and giving a false sense of control.

Telling the community “if you want it, build it yourself, but keep it out of my site” accomplishes something Facebook really fails at: keeping out the crap. By forcing these user apps to be external you can cut out the spam and let users find them on their own. Of course, we’re already starting to see the much anticipated “Twitter Trends” starting to get hit with spam.

Great services that came from the community

• TwitPic
• WeFollow
• TwitLonger
• Remember the Milk for Twitter
• TwitterFeed
• Twitter PollDaddy

Giving power to the community is a good thing, but if we learned anything from MySpace and Facebook it’s that this power needs to be well thought out and controlled in a way where the users don’t feel like they’re being controlled.

Whomever can come up with that will come out as the real social networking giant.

Earlier this week (this morning) I had a sorted break up with long-time-used FireFox add-on TwitterFox. Admittedly, I didn’t really plan for it – it just happened one day. Then there I was using the Web interface to update my Tweets. Which is fine, I actually prefer the Web interface over all the desktop apps that have been built.

Breaking up is like knocking over a coke machine. You can’t do it in one push, you’ve got to rock it back and forth a few times, and then it goes over.- Jerry Seinfeld

I had been unhappy with TwitterFox for a while (almost since the beginning), I was just using it because I needed something, it was the best I found, and I didn’t feel like doing more research on it.

Overall, it was an OK experience because I feel like I know exactly what I want in a Twitter updater. I know what I liked about TwitterFox, and, most importantly, what I hated about it.

TwitterFox Pros and Cons

Pros

• Presence – I have a browser open all day, and it’s right there, very fast to update, not a separate app eating up all my RAM
• @replies – It usually caught my @replies even when I wasn’t the 1st @ listed in a tweet

Cons

• Pop ups – I hate the intermittent pop ups of tweet. I’m sure it can be turned off, but I hated it
• Pop up interval – on the off chance that I wanted to read a tweet as it popped up, if the text was long, it didn’t stay popped up long enough to read. Then I’d have to stop and go read the tweet
• Lazy – it stopped catching all my @replies (the last month or so).
• Replying – the way replies functioned bothered the crap out of me
• I just didn’t like it.

Researching replacements

Just by looking at some people I follow on Twitter, I came up with a pretty good list of TwitterFox alternatives to investigate.

Apps

I don’t like the external apps for Twitter updates, but I’m going to give them all a try and see if I can get into it:

• Twhirl
• EventBox
• destroyTwitter
• Twitterific
• TweetDeck
• Twidget
• Digsby
• Snitter

In-browser options

• TwiterGadget
• TwitterBar
• TwitKit
• TwitBin

That’s what I’m planning to look in to right now. Are there any I missed? I’m open to pretty much anything right now. I was with TwitterFox for a while (maybe a year?) and generally not pleased with it, so I want to make sure to find something that really fits.

Better CSS Font Stacks

A good article on how to jazz up your stacks to try and take advantage of users who have more fonts installed. I’m all for this, and as long as it’s done carefully, can get a nice version of progressive enhancement.

5 Terrible SEO Ideas

Richard Bradshaw goes over some trendy (and terrible) things that are common in SEO such as: keyword stuffing, dupe content, link farms, splash pages, and cloaking.

Fun with Overflows

I think this is a great idea (check out the demo). It creates a very similar interface to that of Plurk, the twitter competitor.

Tweet What you Spend

This is a pretty cool service that uses the Twitter API to track spending. I know it can seem kind of geeky (as is reading articles about CSS…), but tracking your spending is a great way to save money, it gives you a lot of power when you know exactly how your paycheck disappears every month. Provided you don’t mind sharing your expenses with the Twitterverse, this is a good service and very easy to use.

Successfully Present Your Web Designs to Clients

Dave Woods put together a nice article in response to Andy Clarke’s article on static visuals. I’m linking this one up because I think a lot have already read Andy’s and I think Dave did a nice job on this one.

Feature your Products with jQuery

This is a cool jQuery trick from a blog I just started reading a couple weeks ago.

Writing Maintainable CSS

Unfortunately, my link posts are a little backed up right now, so this is probably a week old at this point. But it’s a direct link to the slide show on writing maintainable CSS. I disagree with some of it, but overall, a good presentation.

Space Madness

Ariel is, from what I can gather, awesome, and a consultant for NASA. In this post she described how Twitter is being used on Neptune!

Call it being stuck inside the box, or whatever, but I see a lot of designers clinging onto the concept that the web should look like something tangible (book, magazine, dog, etc.). While the its considered pretty young…around 21 years old… I think the web has been around long enough and created such a great presence for itself that it can be separated from aspects of the physical world. Of course, this don’t concern most website out there, but who said that nytimes.com has to look like a digital news paper. I understand the branding issues that come with making an online news paper look like the paper version, but with the influx of XML/RSS, I don’t see any reason to not have fun with designing on the web.

Anyways, this is my maiden post to the blog and, in a nutshell, I think there are still far too many people not using the web to its fullest potential.
my2cents

with_ease,
Tim