The Tim Berners-Lee of Green Bay
Tim had a hilarious run of tweets today, detailing the shocking parallels between the history of the web and the history of, er, Brett Favre. Jason recapitulated it nicely, and it made me think I ought to open up an app I’ve been meaning to try, called Storify. (One of the brains behind Storify is Burt Herman, who organizes the Hacks and Hackers meetups.) So I did, and here’s another way of looking at Tim’s tweets:
What do you think? (Of the tweet presentation, that is, not the tweet content. The tweet content is hilarious.) Useful? Readable?
Note: one big down-side is that the tweets don’t show up in Google Reader. Well, Reader crew, click on over and check it out.
First, love the idea that you can not only embed tweets, but put them in a series, and insert an introduction/commentary. That seems extremely powerful. (I’m guessing it works with multiple users, too?)
As for the presentation, both for continuity and for its own sake, I think I prefer the sequential layout on Twitter.com: photo on the left of the text (rather than below it), with minimal reply/retweet/timestamp buttons beneath each post. That way, there’s less negative space between tweets — you can pretty easily scan it straight down.
Not only is that consistent with the UI on Twitter.com, it’s also consistent with the way IM programs like iChat work. It’s also how we write dialogue in plays. And I think you have to treat it more like dialogue than a series of epigraphs/quotations.
I’ve got no opinion on the layout, but as a nontweeter, this seems like a much-needed way to get discussions off of twitter and reflect on them at length. It’s much better than just linking to the tweet or the twitter account. I too am curious to see how it looks with dialogue, and if it can incorporate other things besides tweets.
Tim,
Thanks for your comments. Yes, you can embed Tweets from anyone, along with other elements from social media such as Youtube videos and Flickr images.
We originally had a more stream-looking design as you mention, but then went with a more publication feel based on some feedback. One nice thing about our system is that there is an API for stories, so you could actually do different visualizations for the same story.
Also, not sure if you noticed that reply and RT buttons show up when you mouseover a Tweet inside the story.
Please ping me if you’d also like an invite key for the alpha preview — would love to hear your feedback about the user experience.
This is awesome. I’ve been intrigued with Bert and Xavier’s concept ever since they told me about it, but couldn’t quite come up with the best exemplar to spin it in my head. But of course—Tim! I was deeply confused by these tweets today, precisely b/c I neverr saw the whole series. This is simple yet functional.
I spent a long time this evening trying to explain/sell twitter to a small business owning friend who I think could benefit from it, but who is utterly baffled—this could make a big difference to his skepticism.
[…] my own first experiment with Storify. (See Robin’s here.) I tried to include a fair amount of the back-and-forth that went into it, but omitting some […]