1. It’s perfectly ok to critique the work of others even when your own isn’t perfect, since your own will never be perfect.

2. With regard to the “annotated scrollbar” on msnbc.com, I didn’t design or direct that, but I do think it’s interesting. It helps navigate to all of the various media types on a story page (video, polls, comments, slideshows, etc). It’s one of those things you’ll either use and love, or not use and forget about. Doesn’t really do much harm in my opinion.

3. With regard to Newsvine, you didn’t mention anything in particular, but the site hasn’t been redesigned since 2006 so it’s getting a bit long in the tooth. We’re working on a brand new one right now actually.

In the interest of cleaning up on your own backyard before complaining about what the neighbours are doing, would you like to share your thoughts for your design on MSNBC / Newswine articles?

Seriously, what’s up with the icons on the far right that keeps wobbling up and down the screen. Earth to design team. Come in design team.

The reason I don’t like the notifications as part of it is that I (deliberately) miss 99% of my twitter stream. I look at it from time to time, but often enough just send stuff to it and then quickly close Twitter again to continue with work. That is, if I didn’t send it via bit.ly in the first place.

Basically, notifications inline would be useless for me, as I would miss most of them. Conversely, the way I *do* read Twitter is to quickly scan through tweets, and thus, notifications among them would just get in the way of that.

In other words, what I’m saying is, the way *I* use Twitter, that feature is not appealing to me at all. I am open to occasionally trying out other stuff, but I doubt I’ll like this because I hated Twitterific’s embedding of DMs and @mentions into one stream as well. :)

As for the database: yeah, guess that’s what happens when you don’t start out with UTF-8; one day it may bite you in the ass. Not worth investing too much time into, but SHAME ON YOU though. ;-)

Greg: Shush, there’s enough jokes about me and eating already.

Readably looks like a big step forward, though.

Echofon’s name autocomplete could use some work (it’s type and tab autocomplete, but it’ll just guess which one you want in a case of multiple results), namely by copying what they’ve done in their iPhone app (would be easy enough to have a dropdown list using standard OS X bits).

Twitter’s app screamed “visual-polish over functional precision and usability” when I gave it a try. 2 hours and I was back on Echofon.

And I’m pretty sure Faruk should just change his surname to a question. “Faruk Ate?” “Yeah, about 3 hours ago, but I could go for a tea…”

Faruk: The textfield isn’t auto-focused, but if it was focused when you left the app, it will be in focus when you return to the app. It’s perfect behavior. With regard to the inline notifications, yes, clearly that should be a configurable option. You’ll love it though… trust me. Regarding the development of the app: that sounds plausible, but doesn’t sound ideal, if true. Everyone needs teammates to check and improve their work. If Loren designed and built this himself, he did a great job, but probably could have produced an even better product with team collaboration. Also, sorry about the UTF thing. It’s actually a lot harder to solve than one would think. Apparently, converting a database from Latin-1 to UTF-8 is not an easy task. I even had the WordPress guys consult with me on it… not easy.

I also really, really don’t want them to put notifications inline in my stream without it being an opt-in choice you have to enable. I never used Echofon, and that screenshot has promised me I never will. I can see the appeal, but I know that such a feature is really not for everyone. It reminds me of Flickr’s new comment system, which I equally hate (and am not the only one at by far).

I agree with the other three points, though. But, I also don’t think Doug had almost anything to do with the Twitter for Mac app. AFAIK, that’s Loren Brichter near-entirely by himself.

Regarding #1: Feedback is definitely one of the basics of UX and should be part of their app. People would feel like there’s much more going on around their tweets, for instance, I always look at my mentions tab, can’t wait for it to “lighten up” with a new reply.

Great post.