WHY do you do it?

Wonderful TED video

My Experiences with Twitter

When I first joined twitter, I thought it was a crazy thing to use! My status?! I'm going to the loo now, and and now I'm out?!

Ok let's see my first few tweets:

1) Malleswaram, Monday Morning, Marketing, Managers, MacBookPro @mKhoj

2) Alan Cooper: Advocate of interaction design Alice Cooper: American rock singer, songwriter and musician AL COOPER <- Bad Design

3) Dear Corporate Flyers, FLY AWAY FROM HERE >:(

4) The Spirit of Bangalore! It rained!

5) and life is easy...those who think its hard are pessimists

6) @mituj: Are you taking Twitter so seriously?! God, are you American?!

7) Women are more dangerous than men... 2 hour Movies have Villains. A million episodes of a TV soap have VAMPS

8) People in Bangalore...do you hear Ambulance sirens really often nowadays? Something really wrong? Or just something fishy?! How to find out?

9) @mituj: what's this new event on the 9th? Come on Gtalk na...this is painful

10) The better team wins?! False. Chelsea totally controlled Barca...what a shame!

So, (6) and (9) clearly tells you what I thought about twitter in the initial stages.
Then I stopped tweeting for sometime. I just started following some people, whose view I wanted to know. Such as Vir Sanghvi and Shashi Tharoor :P

My twitter home was full of relevant and awesome tweets the moment I started following Chris Spooner, Smashing Magazine, & Abduzeedo. Probably, all on the same day. I'm a big fan of these guys, and must say they're responsible for Twitter being one of the first tabs I open in my browser.

I must thank twitter for their Retweet feature. Which they probably started just around the time I started following these guys. I have been getting really awesome tweets ever since, and I have been following really awesome twitter users.

Well, there are social networks like Facebook and Orkut, that are used to connect with "friends". And there are professional networks like Linkedin that help you to connect with relevant professional contacts.

But twitter, for me, is more of an information repository than a social network. I just have to mark some awesome articles as favourites. And hoping that pals from my profession are following me, I just have to RT and they get the links that I found are cool.

Finally, there are a lot of things to learn from the User Experience that twitter provides.

As Jack Dorsey mentions in the above video, they have been redesigning twitter according to what the users have asked for. They have been adapting to the users' habits, and not the other way round, which is exemplary.

I also like the way Twitter displays the tweets, one after the other. Even if there's a reply to a tweet, it doesn't appear in the tree structure, as they show it in most Comments section. Personally I feel, in the case of twitter, linear is cool.

Another thing I find really awesome is their display of "3 New Tweets" without page refresh. Many other portals do this (GMail does), and I think this boosts the user experience a lot.
Also, the tab saying: (3) Twitter/Home.

One more thing worth a mention: The Fail Whale. How awesome is that?! Now isn't that a really cool way to show that something's wrong?

Let me end this by saying: I'm not on Facebook; I don't need Facebook. But, I'm glad that I'm on Twitter. Thank you Twitter.

Inspiration to blog: Thank you Tina Ross Eisenberg

Got this video on twitter. I am absolutely starting to love this social networking site. Shall post about my experiences with twitter soon. (Now that I have resolved to blog regularly about design)

Thank you Tina Ross Eisenberg :)