After searching for a while for a list of standard urls to reserve for your own use on the webapp you’re building, I decided to compile my own.. Starting with what twitter seem to reserve (they don’t publish a list, understandably), and adding a few of my own. If you can think of others, put them in the comments and I’ll update as appropriate.
Other things to consider are.. Reserve anything with the name of your app included (e.g. twitter don’t allow users to create urls that include “twitter”). Reserve as many urls for authentication methods as possible, I only included a couple here, oauth and openid.
Here’s a published google doc, and a csv file, text, and xls.
Posted October 15, 2009 in the Design, Lists, Projects, Web 2.0 category, with the tags: development, twitter, urls, webapps, and 6 comments
(Why am I up at 2am blogging about something so trivial? An attempt at gaining traffic based on an early brain-dump about a minor Twitter change maybe? Which this is, a brain-dump, there may be mistakes, but that doesn’t matter now, does it. As long as I’m “first!”.)
So here’s the email you get now:
- It’s HTML
- The user’s avatar is included. Sometimes this could be broken if the user changes their avatar, because the avatar URL would also have changed, but it’s hardcoded into the email at the previous URL. (unless they’ve solved the drifting avatar url problem with a consistent endpoint?)
- You’re shown the number of followers/friends/tweets of that user. But the followers/friends are separated by the tweets (updates) which is initially confusing and not easy to scan to compare the ratio.
- The FROM part of the email is now just noreply@twitter.com. This used to include the email address you have on your twitter account, which meant filtering your email based on which Twitter account these were sent to was easy. This is now in the REPLY-TO field in the email instead, can you filter on that? Or you can filter based on the TO field AND the FROM field as a combination, yeah that might do it. (Has anyone made a nice GMail filter for this yet?)
- Your username has been removed from the body of the email. Which means you can’t instantly see which account this person is following following (if you have multiple accounts).
- Showing more info in the email might be an attempt to reduce traffic on Twitter.com, but I can’t believe that would have a significant impact on their costs.
- I’m guessing the grey box in the email is supposed to contain the bio? I haven’t had one yet that does. Bug?
- The emails are sent as multi-part, which means the text version of old is still there for text-only email clients. Good!
- It would be great to see the most recent couple of tweets from that user. It’s usually easy to see if they’re spam just from that.
- Better still, show which friends/followers you share. Then I might gather the context, or the network we share.
- Or maybe the last few @replies to that person. This might show the level of engagement from other users, further indicating whether they’re spam.
Isn’t it fun making rushed judgements about the small things Twitter do? :) Anything I missed?
UPDATE: Twitter just made a small change to DM (direct message) emails, the FROM field no-longer has the real name of the person the message is from. It used to say “Josh Russell via Twitter”. Again, this was good for scanning visually and filtering on. It now just says “Twitter”.
Strangely they *have* included your email address as part of the FROM address, contrary to what it used to be which was noreply@twitter.com… The opposite to the change they just made on the emails I describe above. It would be nice to have some consistency on small details like this.
Posted May 7, 2009 in the Design category, with the tags: analysis, email, twitter, UI, and 4 comments
I was at Interesting 2008 earlier this year where we had a sneaky look at the redesigned coins, presented by their designer, along with the story of how they came to be. As the name of the event suggests, it was really interesting!
View large
What I didn’t notice at the time, is a design flaw that I’m amazed was allowed to happen.
Take a look at the coins, do you see it?
Read about the new coins at the Royal Mint
There are no numbers. Meaning that if you can’t read, or just can’t read English, you’re at an immediate disadvantage.
This is such an obvious omission! How did this happen! Are they assuming that people will know what the coins are based on the previous coins? It might be the first time some people see our currency, they will be clueless.
Now maybe the transition will help, for a while there will be both the old and the new coins in circulation. This will probably solve the problem through comparison and thus familiarity. But how long are these coins going to be around, and how long until the old one disappear? I assume that banks will be collecting the old ones for several years to come, but one day the new ones will be the only ones. People think very short term don’t they.
Also…. coins? really? We don’t need them anymore. This is 2008 after-all, it’s the future! How much is this costing? I’m willing to bet that the cost is somewhere close to what the cost of transitioning away from coins to a newer technology would be..
Posted November 11, 2008 in the Design category, with the tags: accessibility, coinage, coins, Design, interesting2008, money, UI, and 7 comments
I want:
A normal headphone jack so i can use my own headphones. And one that will also handle a mic input if a handsfree is used.
Easy, standards-based, phone-to-phone syncing of data/contacts/sms/pictures/etc..
The same memory cards as everything else. SD preferably. Normal size, high speed a bonus.
The ability to use my 3G data connection with my laptop over Bluetooth.
An actual USB port, yeah alright the mini version. USB 2.0 too please!
A joystick that you can press inward to make selections without accidentily moving the cursor up or down.
Oh, and of course, Symbian (Series 60) and come with Flash Player as standard, for free.
I don’t think these are unreasonable requests.
read more..
Posted April 15, 2006 in the Design, General, Lists, Mobile category, and 1 comment
