[Adium-devl] (no subject)

[Eric Richie]

On May 10, 2008, at 7:40 PM,  wrote:

>
> On May 9, 2008, at 1:08 PM, Zachary West wrote:
>
>> On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 3:32 PM, Colin Barrett <timber at lava.net>  
>> wrote:
>>> Actually we /already/ have Twitter integration that is better than
>>> using the web API -- XMPP.
>>
>> I disagree. I plan on (probably this weekend) creating a Twitter
>> account service which places your friends on your contact list with
>> their status as their recent tweets. This combined with a recent
>> status window would work perfectly. Messages to the user would be
>> direct messages. Then Adium-using Tweeters could potentially hold
>> conversations over the medium as well.
>
> Gah gah gah gah nooooooo. I totally disagree, as someone who uses
> Twitter a lot. I think that would just piss off a lot of people. Here
> a couple reasons why you shouldn't have Twitter in the contact list:
>
>  - You follow many more people than you could care about seeing all
> at once. For example, I'm following ~200 people.
>  - More people follow you than you could care about seeing all at
> once, including people who you don't know. A little less than 500
> people follow me, for example.
>  - You can't organize Twitter contacts into groups. (yet?)
>  - You can only direct message people who are following you (spam
> prevention measure), so you can't just IM anyone you follow).
>  - Twitter's about microblogging, not really about status or presence
> or anything like this. If I have a random thought or complaint, I'll
> post that to Twitter. People can reply to that, talk about their own
> stuff, etc. The right way to show the information coming from Twitter
> is a river-of-news style timeline. That's how it's presented on the
> website and in every Twitter client.

++


> I would vastly prefer the bookmarked chat option, but I really don't
> even see the point of that. Here are some technical reasons why we
> should just stick with the XMPP API:
>
>  - The web API is slower (you have to poll, while XMPP is push)
>  - It doesn't allow you to do some things (for example, if you want
> use the "track" feature, you have to use IM or get SMS notifications).
>  - You can do anything you could do from the web API via the XMPP api
> using commands -- e.g. if I want to follow gruber, I would enter:
> "follow gruber". To direct message Elliott, I'd do: "d eharris You up
> for in-n-out?"

I REALLY don't like the sound of this.  This would kill usability for  
a great many of our users.  I don't want to turn something as simple  
as twitter into something that (arguably) rivals irc in beginner  
unfriendliness.  I DO NOT want to have to rely on a bunch of commands  
and arguments to interact with the service.  I am unwilling to hand  
something like that to our users.  I realize that most twitter users  
are more tech-savvy than most, but that's not what we're about.  If  
our goal is simplicity and user experience, this would be a very  
precarious path to travel down.  I would like to see what you have,  
but I currently have some apprehension based on what I've heard thus  
far.

-Eric