Disqus - Latest Comments for davisre

Re: Rebooting the News #10

davisre — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:35:00 -0000

In the old days, it used to feel a little bit rotten to receive Time magazine in the mail a day after it arrived on newsstands. So much for rewarding subscribers. Nowadays, the web allows us to discuss popular stories -- like last week's cover story on Cheney's efforts to lobby Bush to pardon Libby -- before the subscribers have even received the issue.

Those are the hazards of paper and physical mail. But the equivalent for the paperless world happens when Dave Winer adds the latest podcast to his HTML page but doesn't update his RSS feed. All those old-fashioned people who get podcasts through their web browsers have already heard #18, but I wonder when the mail man will deliver it to my player? :-)

Re: Be sweet, don't retweet (Scripting News)

davisre — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:33:31 -0000

Yea, but this can't be a client feature. It needs support in the server. Right now, to implement this feature, a client would need to send a query for each and every person you follow, just to compile and collate their favorites into your stream.

In fact one of the problems with the way the community is embracing and building on Twitter, and with Twitter's inability to keep up, is that these ad-hoc choices made by clients are creating a wild west that will be difficult to tame.

We'll see where it all goes.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

davisre — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:33:48 -0000

It sure would be nice to search just the tweets from people I follow. Often I'll remember seeing something in my stream but won't remember who said it, and currently Twitter's search feature (even if it searched more than just a few days) can't help me find the tweet.

Re: Be sweet, don't retweet (Scripting News)

davisre — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:03:52 -0000

Seriously, retweeting sucks. The "RT @blah:" encoding is cryptic and takes up precious space, meaning many retweets have to edit and reduce the sometimes carefully worded, painstakingly condensed original. Plus, popular tweets show up in my stream repeatedly like stupid forwarded email.

What if: what if Twitter actually made use of the "favorite" feature. What if I could configure my stream so that I see the favorites of my friends, inline? (Or perhaps just the favorites of certain friends? Or perhaps I could set a threshold so that once a tweet is the favorite of N friends, I'd see it.) I'd love that. Currently, peeking at my friends' favorites -- the few who use the feature -- is like finding a treasure trove of quips and links, but it's so far off the beaten path I never do it.

It would eliminate and replace the retweet (with the one drawback that someone couldn't add their two- or three-word commentary to the original). It would help the problem of discovery, too, which Twitter is always crowing about.

I'm not the biggest digg fan, but if they were to create a Twitter competitor, wanna bet they'd build this in?