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.

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.

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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..

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.

Like most industries, the mobile phone manufacturing industry could learn a lot from the current state of the web. Tools that let you have easy access to your data, that let you use already standard third party devices or services, in this case USB, SD, SyncML, 3.5mm audio jacks. And that let you share your data with others or even remove all your data completely.

Flickr found that even though they provide an API that allows you to take all your data and leave, nobody has actually done it. Just knowing that they can if they need to instils trust in the provider and therefore people stay.

They will get more brand loyalty and longevity out of their products by making these very simple changes. Hell, even if BenQ made a phone that did that stuff i’d buy it! Even BenQ!

I consider us to be at Web 1.5, and that in itself is generous.

To compare it to mobile phone technology, Web 0.5 (web beta?) was analogue GSM, 1G, which then became digital, or 2G, then we added GPRS as an interim fix while we all waited for 3G. GPRS became known as 2.5G. it didn’t do a lot more, but maybe a bit quicker, ok and the pricing structure was a bit different… Maybe this isn’t the best analogy…

What I’m trying to say is this, isn’t the Web 2.0, as it’s being talked about now, our GPRS. It’s doing all the same stuff we’ve always known the web can do but a little bit quicker, or in this case prettier.

So I’m going to call it Web 1.5.

Web 2.0 for me is something different. The current state certainly doesn’t warrant a whole version increase.

Web 2.0 is psychological. This, as I will show, is true In all cases but refers to different things. Web 2.0 for a web developer is what we’re doing now. We’re using JavaScript, CSS and some backend integration to do clever data exchanges and then display them in a pretty way. Web 2.0 for a user is a whole different thing. If we consider web 1.0 to be the web as we have grown to know and love it, then surely the next “versionâ€? of that is going to be quite drastic?

Web 2.0 is what you may call Web 3.0. Actually I hate the numbering thing. Web 2.0 is something that may simply boil down to a single login. Simple eh? But what does that mean? The implications of this cover many subjects: privacy, customer relationships, trust, and ultimately data ownership. Ok maybe this is further off than Web 2.0, maybe this is going to have a new name! This is about remote living, entrusting your life to a virtual place, hard to fathom.

In real terms it means replacing most of the function of the traditional browser and logging in to your “browserâ€? whenever you use the internet (web?). I hate to say it, but the Microsoft Passport was a great idea! Although that’s not exactly what this is about, it was certainly a stepping stone across the river. Why not have the same login for all the tools you use on the Internet? I guess why not is because it means that one company could potentially own the access and storage of your data.

Obviously, this is just a small technical and political point to get over. The real problem is how do people make money out of this. Well that’s simple! They just keep doing what they always did, of course.

I think I’ve said far too much. Let me complete these (probably) highly contentious views in a later post. Web 2.0 will be exciting, I hope that I’m slightly right about how it will turn out :)