links for 2008-11-28

links for 2008-11-27

Are blogs “so 2004”?; Rewriting the Twitter front-end

  • “As a writer, though, I’m onto the system’s real appeal: brevity. Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times. Twitter’s character limit puts everyone back on equal footing. It lets amateurs quit agonizing over their writing and cut to the chase.”
  • “Last week I decided to rewrite the Twitter.com front-end on Google App Engine to incorporate modern front-end programming best practices, exceptional performance, and establish a solid platform for further development.” Niall *really* has a lot of time on his hands…

Causal is to usability, as…

  • “In our user experience work, we often come across circumstances where we record an outcome and look for conditions to help explain why. For example, the movement of an ad banner might coincide with an increase in the click-through rate. As humans we would naturally assign a causal relationship between the new position and the increase. But, it is coincidence only. If it happens consistently, we might suspect that there’s something deeper going on.”