Tag Archives: follow

Twitter Android App: Beauty is in the detail

I’ve been a Twitter user for about 6+ years and have started accessing Twitter via their Android app a few months back. Not surprisingly my usage of Twitter has grown manyfold since I’ve moved from Tweetdeck to Android app, and frankly the reasons are obvious.

1) Great app
2) Continuous availability/access

The android app for twitter is one of the most beautifully (think usability) designed apps. It has just the right buttons at the desired places, most intuitive functionality and easy on the eye. Here’s a little example of the nifty app’s detailing

As you can see, the timeline view has app the possible things a user would want to do

General – Most Used (Excluding replies, discovery etc)

Compose a tweet
Search
Follow someone

Pertaining to a tweet in Timeline

Reply to a tweet
Retweet a tweet
Favourite a tweet

Now all these are great but an extra case comes for Retweets. Not only would I want to interact with the tweet but I might also want to follow the person whose tweets are being RTed

Yes, that little highlighted icon is what caught my attention. Here ‘Chris Messina’ who I follow, RTed a tweet from Samantha (whom I don’t follow). and Twitter’s app cleverly shows a tiny icon along these tweets which lets users follow the person whose tweets are being RTed. A quick click on this and you are done

That’s a nice example of putting relevant features beautifully without affecting the user experience. I’d love to talk more about the app sometime.

Random Tweets Bug

It started a while back when I noticed a couple people in my timeline complaining about getting tweets(appear in their timeline) from people they don’t follow.

Those must me RT’s I thought and dismissed it but then I saw this tweet,

Refusing at first to admit that it must a bug in Twitter, I thought it just might have got something to do with list feature but on further inquiry, that too turned out to be not the case.

As it turns out there’s a bug in Twitter due to which people are seeing random tweets from people they aren’t following. Let’s see how long does it take people to realize this and for Twitter to fix it

Also, apparently there’s another even more irritating part of this bug in which some people are getting these tweets from people they aren’t following via SMS.

A look around the public timeline confirms the existence of the “Random Tweets” bug.

and a look at this tweet tells us that this has been going on for a couple of days now

Slideshare: Follow or Add as a contact ?

3 Replies

Got a mail from Slideshare notifying about a new follower. Curious, I opened the email and here’s what I saw.

If you haven’t noticed what I mean, there are two different terms being used to represent an action i.e. Follower and Contact. While the subject reads ” lindamoodbell is now following you on Slideshare” the very first line in email reads “lindamoodbell added you as a contact on Slideshare”.

So is lindamoodbell following me on Twitter oops Slideshare or has she added me as a contact ? And if they mean the same thing why are these terms loosely used for each other?

Interestingly the email also mentions that I can too add her as contact on Slideshare(no mention about following her back)

I wrote about the changes from term contact/friend etc to follower in both Scribd and Slideshare here and mentioned how exisiting users might find these changes in terminology confusing. A look at lindamoodbell’s page on Slideshare confirms this.

Not even a single mention of word follow/follower by users. While Slideshare might want its users to follow each other, its users seem happy adding each other as just contacts.

What do you think about these changes ?