My review of new Twitter

OK, so, here’s the thing about new Twitter and me. When it first showed up, I gave it a try, and I thought, “Heyyy, this is kind of cool!”

I am no longer using new Twitter.

So somewhere in that spectrum there probably lies a logical, thought-out reaction. Somewhere, deep inside, I can segment what I liked (at first) and what ultimately turned me off.  You get to witness that thought process.

What I like

Bear in mind that I’ve never gotten on the Seemic or Hootsuite bandwagon, so I am not used to columns in my Twitter world. I think I kind of liked having columns at first because it was, well, different. And kind of neat.

If 1 of your friends is talking to another of your friends, you can jump in and reply to both of them very easily. Hitting “reply” includes both usernames. Convenient if you really do want to respond to both or several people.

I like the fact that you can see lots of recent tweets from a person if you click the little arrow. It’s really hard to keep track of people in a Twitter stream, so I was discovering a lot of tweets I didn’t know people were making (this also made me kind of sad, because it showed me that I’m out of touch with lots of people)

What made me switch it off

As you probably know if you’ve been popping by my blog for awhile, chats are a big thing for me. I really feel they are important. The new Twitter interface makes chatting really hard. Let me explain why.

When I go into a chat, I do a search for the hash tag, but then I jump over to my “replies” section to make sure I’m catching any bits of the conversation directed at me. Well, in new Twitter, when you’re “in the conversation,” your replies page link disappears. I don’t really understand the logic to this, but it was a huge turn-off to me.

Another turn-off, ironically, is something that I liked at first – the two columns. As nice as it is to be able to click the little arrow and see more about a certain person and his or her tweet, that information stays on the right hand column once you go back to perusing your Twitter stream. I find that kind of confusing. I get distracted by the information on the right and lose track of what I’m doing in the left column (maybe this is a challenge on the part of Twitter to see if we can handle two columns of changing information well. If so, I failed).

I also don’t really like the new placement of things. I think the search bar “pops” more on the right-hand side. It’s kind of buried up at the top in the new version. I think the interface is just a bit more tricky than “old” Twitter.

So that’s my review…pretty eh. It’s not terrible, and at least there aren’t (so far as I can tell) major privacy ramifications like when Facebook makes changes. Still, I think I’ll be hanging with “old Twitter” for awhile longer.

image by a d. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/okiesurfer