Twitter Moves To Curb Instagram Links

Hammeh writes According to a report on Mashable, Twitter have sent out messages to some of their high profile users prompting them to share images using Twitter's own service rather than Instagram links. The news comes 2 years since Instagram pulled support for Twitter cards and has been part of the continuing battle between the two social networks. With Instagram now having overtaken Twitter in terms of users, this may be a move to try and use high profile users to show off Twitter's own image and content tools.

Comments

Never forget...

[Anonymous Coward]

Never forget: You are the product, not the customer.

Re:Never forget...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I'm the counterfieter on the corner giving them cheap knockoffs of Burt Reynolds and Ainsley Harriott.

Re:Never forget...

[CaptainDork]

This.

Regarding the march of social media and search engines, it is the prime mover that explains everything.

Serious question

[Anonymous Coward]

How many people here actually use Twitter?

I created an account years ago, never posted anything, and I don't read anything off of twitter... I'm 26.

Re:Serious question

[Anonymous Coward]

The only real use case I have had for Twitter was to check the status of some services (it's generally easier to find service's twitter handle than their actual status page if they even have one).

Re: Serious question

[Anonymous Coward]

I use twitter only for following. Slashdot, for example. Little clutter.

Re:Serious question

[Anonymous Coward]

I look at the twitter feeds of some venders and creative professionals I like, but I don't even have an account. I just have their feed pages bookmarked and scroll through it in the morning with my coffee. I must say tho that twitter is the only social media site that has ever tempted me to sign up, in fact i've been sort of planning to get around to it someday while every other site including linkdin is a big "oh hell no" so I guess twitter does have a leg up since I read it and might make an account someday.

Re:Serious question

[fahrbot-bot]

How many people here actually use Twitter?

I created an account years ago, never posted anything, and I don't read anything off of twitter... I'm 26.

I'm 51 and created (parked) an account in 2012 and have one tweet posted from April 2014 -- after they changed the site style/layout and started nagging people with a sample "first tweet" for those w/o any tweets. It says: "Shut up Twitter; I'll tweet when I want to."

Sometimes, I post a tweet or two, but usually delete them after a while once any current relevance passes. Ya, that's not how you're suppose to use it, but so what. If you're not promoting something and/or yourself, Twitter is just a pointless waste of time - like all the rest of the social media sites.

Re:Serious question

[tepples]

I'm @PinoBatch.

But this list mentions Erris, Mactrope*, gnutoo, inTheLoo, willeyhill*, westbake*, Odder*, ibane, DeadZero, freenix, myCopyWrong, right handed, GNUChop, trimmer, and wiiiyhiii*. Or, rather, Twitter uses them. All of them. And this Twitter can post more than 140 characters.

* These are typosquatted versions of other Slashdot users' usernames.

Re:Serious question

[gronofer]

At least you managed to make an account. I'm not sure how you do that on Instagram: it points you to some app that doesn't run on Linux.

Never would have guessed

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this the beginning of the end for Twitter?

Re: Never would have guessed

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if there was ever much of a beginning, profit-wise...

Re:Never would have guessed

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps.

Actually it shows that the "twits" at Twitter are asking the wrong questions about why their photo sharing service isn't getting much "traction" with users.

I think we are actually seeing the "twits" at Twitter realize they are part of a competitive market, and the competition, Instagram in this case, has a better product.

BTW...I don't use Twitter/Twatter, or Instagram, so I don't care either way.

magic word: urinate You can't make this stuff up...seriously!

Social Networking is a mess

[Iamthecheese]

Social networking sites have forgotten the reason they exist, and the reason people use them. People don't go to a social networking site to be monetized, they tolerate being monetized so long as the social network provides sufficient value.

It's a similar situation to the early days of searching. People didn't go to early Yahoo.com to get the things Yahoo wanted to push, people went to search the internet and tolerated having things pushed at them as long as the search was good enough. But as soon as Google offered a good search with minimal advertising the market spoke very loudly about that kind of thing. I feel like there's a pent-up demand in social networking for low friction, low-bullshit connecting of people. The first social network that offers a superior product and doesn't stand in peoples' way will make a killing.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[CaptainDork]

... will make a killing.

How?

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

... will make a killing.

How?

Shotgun blast to the chest?

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Iamthecheese]

How?

When old Yahoo made money from its search engine it did so by pushing paid sites as search results, cluttering up the interface with advertisements, and otherwise being intrusive and unpleasant. And it lacked the self-awareness to change this behavior. Rather than saying, "How can we make things better for the user?" they said, "How can we make more money from the user?" So while better search results was on their radar an interface like Google's just never came up as a possibility. That's why they were blown completely out of the water. Google made money as a search provider without using Yahoo-esque tactics by being the first to do what present social networks are doing (analytics) but more importantly by being a place users wanted to go. Twitter is already doing this successfully. Look at their interface: light, efficient, smooth, and fast. And they're very successful. By limiting user actions now they're eating the seed corn. The'll make more money in the short term but in the long term they're pushing users to less limited places.

But I digress. By "social networking" I meant Facebook-esque networking. Attempts to allow comprehensive social collectives to happen. Facebook has fallen far down the monetization rabbit hole in the same way old Yahoo did. The way Facebook thinks is of where to put ads, how to better manipulate users into sub-optimal decisions (such as mis-click capture), how to make games that will best entangle users ... Rather than saying, "How can we make things better for the user?" they say, "How can we make more money from the user?" The money is in having many users and in letting them do what they do, with a completely unobtrusive, subtle advertising network offering things they like and want. When a social network focuses to a massive extent on making the user experience as excellent as possible even if that's less immediately profitable they'll get more than enough market share to make up the difference.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

Social networking sites have forgotten the reason they exist, and the reason people use them. People don't go to a social networking site to be monetized, they tolerate being monetized so long as the social network provides sufficient value.

And that's the problem. The social network never existed to do anything but monetize them.

My personal pet peeve is "news" articles that could just as easily be IMG SRC="foo.jpg" but are now IFRAME SOMEGODDAMNTWITTERORINSTAGRAM that loads some third-party Javashit ... because if they loaded the .jpg, it would work, but an IFRAME and potential XSS vulneratbility makes the reader more monetizable, so fuck what actually works.

Fuck the web. Fuck webdevs. It's a static content. HTML 3.0 would deliver it as effectively. But no, thanks to webdevs and Javashit, we've got goddamn iframes to third-party sites where a simple IMG SRC tag would have worked.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[BronsCon]

Actually, genius, "Javashit", as you call it, when used properly, is leaps and bounds better than iFrames. Imagine the article loading in its entirety, so you can start reading it, before there's even a single image tag on the page; then, well-written javascript popping the images in as you read. The content loads and renders faster and you have an over-all better experience, especialy if you happen to be on a mobile device or slow connection.

But that's cool, just go on blaming web developers and technology, keep shielding the bean counters and middle managers who refuse to consider the end users and force us to either create complete shite or move on to the next job, where we'll be forced to make the same decision again... and again... and again.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[sumdumass]

Imagine the article loading in its entirety, so you can start reading it, before there's even a single image tag on the page; then, well-written javascript popping the images in as you read. The content loads and renders faster and you have an over-all better experience, especialy if you happen to be on a mobile device or slow connection.

I don't have to imagine that. Every time I turn no script off, I almost always hit a site like that and the images constantly move the formatting and content to fit the images in making reading more than the first couple lines almost impossible. This, if the logic isn't obvious, defeats the benefits you expose very readily. Of course these sites could be the one that do "when not used properly" but I cannot tell the difference.

It's even worse when trying to view in a non standard browser or on a phone or something with a limited screen and slower connection.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Bill Dog]

Where "well-written javascript" means popping the images in while I'm reading, and not fucking waiting until I'm trying to scroll down to read more.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[BronsCon]

That is most definitely "not used properly". I may have misspoke when I said no image tags, actually, as my preferred implementation is to use a 1px transparent PNG as the default SRC for the image tags, so they can still be inline on the page, with width and height specified (via CSS, of course). Done correctly, as I was saying, no images or scripts load until the text content of the page has loaded and rendered and you are able to start reading the article.

It's not even that hard to do, but most devs don't take the time to think about it, usually because they're not allowed to spend their time on such things. Again, blame shit-tire middle management and bean counters for that.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

... will make a killing.

How?

Shotgun blast to the chest?

And *that* would be the first social network worth signing up for: one that doesn't stand in your way, but effectively delivers shotgun blasts to the chest on demand... perhaps via a "dislike" button?

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[BronsCon]

Bingo. Well, almost. What you're complaining about can be done effectively and correctly, as well. Assuming it's done intelligently, with properly-sized placeholders so loading the images won't move other content around and ensuring that images less than one full-screen-scroll away are loaded, it's a decent way to save bandwidth without annoying users. That said, it also requires estimating the user's connection speed based on load times for the images that have loaded thus far, so you can disable it and just load the remaining images (in order of appearance) if the user is on a connection slow enough that they might miss images while scrolling because they haven't loaded by the time the user scrolls past.

Don't get me started on sites that don't even start loading the images until they're scrolled into view and don't use placeholders, so the images, when they finally do load push down the content you were reading. If I understand correctly, that's what you're talking about and yes, as a web developer, it annoys me to no end when some code monkey pulls that shit and sullies my good name, and that of the other competent developers I know.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Bill Dog]

Where I work I think the bandwidth is fine but the latency is horrendous, with every individual connection having to be checked against an extensive list of unapproved sites. So on-demand loading is an irritant/causes jerky scroll motion, even when content rearrangement is not invovled.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

. That said, it also requires estimating the user's connection speed based on load times for the images that have loaded thus far, so you can disable it and just load the remaining images (in order of appearance) if the user is on a connection slow enough that they might miss images while scrolling because they haven't loaded by the time the user scrolls past.

And there is where it fails.

Don't get me started on sites that don't even start loading the images until they're scrolled into view and don't use placeholders, so the images, when they finally do load push down the content you were reading. If I understand correctly, that's what you're talking about and yes, as a web developer, it annoys me to no end when some code monkey pulls that shit and sullies my good name, and that of the other competent developers I know.

The unstated assumption in your first paragraph isn't just about how fast the images load, it's about how fast the reader reads. The advantage of the IMG tag approach is that the images, all of them, load in the background. For most news articles we're not talking about megabytes per image (and we are often talking about megabytes of Javascript frameworks!), so the bandwidth savings of making everything active aren't necessarily as big as you think they might be.

FWIW, we do agree that the Buzzfeed approach of forcing the user to scroll all the way up/down through the page to get the content to load is infuriating. It's one of the reasons I harp so strongly against Javashit. As the reader, I can't trust the developer to be competent. Thus, I prefer that content creators keep their crap simple. Not everything has to be an app. Especially static content, and especially when the content of the article is a series of sentences punctuated by big squares that, rather than loading images, contain t.co redirects to the images that some doofus tweeted.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[BronsCon]

Jerky scrolling sounds more like they've got you using underpowered machines. There's no excuse, on modern hardware, for the process of loading and rendering an image to bog the machine down to the point that the UI is affected. I say this having used, and developed on, a single-core Atom based netbook, exclusively, from 2007-2010, without issue; but then, I tend to develop as though resources are limited, since that was actually the case for me for the first 28 years of my life.

I can totally see other developers, who haven't been conditioned to realize that system resources are finite and not everyone has the latest and greatest CPU and GPU with oodles of RAM and gigabit internet (I wish... 150mbps is the best I can get and it's not worth the expense), assuming, since their code only lags slightly on their maching (which they blame, of course, on the browser dev tools), that it will, at worst, only lag a little on the user's machine which, typically, is much *much* less powerful.

I struggled for over 4 years to get my former boss to see this as a problem. Former boss. For a reason. We started losing clients as more and more javascript was added to the sites we were hosting and page render times went through the roof, but optimizing client-side code was forbidden; it didn't run on our servers, so it wasn't our problem and, besides, it ran fine for us, so there must not actually have been a problem. Or so he said. Of course, I knew better, and I still do, but that knowledge failed to transfer and the bloat continues in my absence, getting worse by the week.

So, I really don't blame the developers implementing the shit code, even; it all comes back to the idiot telling them not to fix what's broken, because they don't see how or why it's broken in the first place.

I worked for myself for 7 years before taking that job and I watched the quality of my code steadily decline while I was there. I've only been working for myself again for a little less than 2 months and I'm already seeing the quality of my output shooting back up to where it was 4 years ago, and still climbing, as I've learned much over the past 4 years, on top of simply having better tools now than I did then.

Without that perspective, though, I see how easy it is to blame developers for everything, but the reality is much, much different in most cases and developers don't get to choose to write good code; they only get to choose between writing shit code for their current employer or for their next. Sometimes that's because the employer sucks and sometimes it's because they suck; I've talked about both here.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[BronsCon]

Especially static content, and especially when the content of the article is a series of sentences punctuated by big squares that, rather than loading images, contain t.co redirects to the images that some doofus tweeted.

And this is where your understanding of the problem fails.

Again, this is a middle-management and bean counter problem, not a developer problem. The developers don't sit there and ask "How can we add more Twitter to our pages?" On the contrary, the bean counters say "We can save on bandwidth by letting Twitter and Instagram host our images, while at the same time monetizing our users through forced interaction" and the managers relay that as "Give us the ability to easily link to Twitter and Instagram images or go find another job".

And, of course, the developers do it. Why? And why shouldn't you fault them for it? Because they know damn well that if they go work somewhere else, it's just more of the same, from the same kind of shitty bean counters and managers who don't understand that this shit kills their user base, in turn killing their income. If they don't do it for their current employer, they'll be asked to do it for their next, and the one after that, and after that, and so on, and so forth, until they are unemployable. Even McDonalds won't hire them after they're on their 6th job in a year. Then they starve.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

Google made money as a search provider without using Yahoo-esque tactics

Mm...

http://searchengineland.com/go...

Twitter is already doing this successfully. Look at their interface: light, efficient, smooth, and fast.

I'll respectfully disagree. Try it on a 1st-gen iPad: the only thing that'll crash Safari faster than Twitter due to out of memory errors are news sites stuffed with MB worth of JS to serve ads, collect analytics, and clutter screen real-estate with floating navigation elements.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

"The first social network that offers a superior product and doesn't stand in peoples' way will make a killing for a short time until facebook and any other major player at the time launches full scale patent wars to drive them out of business."

There. That's the more likely outcome.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[ultranova]

with width and height specified (via CSS, of course)

...Why? Width and height of an image are functions of its content and have nothing to do with style. What do you gain by specifying them separately from the IMG tag itself, apart from more complexity (and probably slower page loads due to the need to download and parse more CSS)?

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Antique Geekmeister]

> Actually, genius, "Javashit", as you call it, when used properly, is leaps and bounds better than iFrames

Neither of which is better than actually keeping the content in clean plain text format. Excess eye candy damages performance and risks security on both ends of a web connection, and also makes the content less accessible to older hardware and to people with visual difficulty or limited mobility. I'm afraid that I _do_ blame web developers, because their excess reliance on eye candy leads to things like the new Slashdot interface.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[JaredOfEuropa]

But as soon as Google offered a good search with minimal advertising the market spoke very loudly about that kind of thing.

Google wasn't the first search engine with a minimalist site design; Altavista started that, and I think you're right about it being an important driver for their success. This was in the days of dial-up, and the difference between loading the Yahoo page and the Altavista one was quite a few seconds.

The model for today's social networks appear to be to deliberately start with low-friction, low-bullshit, come-in-we're-open policies (sometimes after a beta-for-the-leet-only period), become popular, then cash in and pile on the restrictions, rules, ads and dataraping. Not that I begrudge the founders of a good startup their fortunes, and I'm not a big fan of the word "sell-out" and the sentiment that it carries, but in some of these cases that word does apply. When you sell your initial users on being all open and huggy, with the intent of adding massive monetization schemes later (or selling your business to someone who will), then you ought to feel a little bit sleazy about it.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Lunix Nutcase]

Imagine the article loading in its entirety, so you can start reading it, before there's even a single image tag on the page;

Or I can just imagine having the patience to wait a whopping 5 seconds for the whole page to render?

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah? well try using slashdot on a 486 running linux 2.2! It's unusable!

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[CaptainDork]

There's a problem with your business plan, and that's the paradigm shift from private company to public corporation.

Once social media and search engine companies go IPO, the business model changes and the suits arrive.

While two of the dynamics don't change, in that the user is the product and the client is the advertiser, the ownership shift changes dramatically.

During initial growth, the interest of the user is the primary consideration as companies work to gain critical mass.

After the IPO, shareholder short-sighted greed kicks. Appreciating and understanding that single part of the business model serves to inform regarding all else.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll never change because these companies need investors. Tell an investor you've designed a service that helps people make and spend time with friends and the real world and they're going to wonder how you're going to make money when those people are not using your service. They want services that gather a lot of data on its users and keeps them using the services as much as possible, not outside.

The only one that really acts as a true social networking service is Meetup, but that's probably because it was founded quite awhile back. They're not exactly getting a bunch of hype and booming, but they actually help people make real friendships, not spend all their time on the website.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Frosty Piss]

The model for today's social networks appear to be to deliberately start with low-friction, low-bullshit, come-in-we're-open policies (sometimes after a beta-for-the-leet-only period), become popular, then cash in and pile on the restrictions, rules, ads and dataraping.

A lot of this is because at a certain point the realize / understand that the vulture capitalists who invested the bizziolns of cash for the cool office space and retro pinball machines want a return on their investment. The other part is that many or even most of these start-ups have from the word "go" operated under the plan of developing a product and than offloading it to Facebook for a billion or two. It's all about the money, and you can't make money without "monetizing" the product.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

I absolute hate websites that do that.
1) I've never come across a site that does it probably. They all reflow the page or mess with were I'm positioned.
2) I can never reach the standard About Us, Contact Us, and the rest of the footer because there is no bottom on auto-load sites yet they put content there anyway.
3) I finish the page I'm on before going to the next page. That means I open every link I plan to follow in background tabs. They have minutes to load, but all the bullshit dynamic loading pages don't load much thus I'm still forced to wait for them when I start reading that page.
4) I expect the full webpage to be in my browser's memory. When traveling I'll open up a bunch of articles to read then go offline. When I discover the site decided not to load half the article because I didn't scroll through it when I had a connect, I never visit that site again.
5) When Firefox is using 3GB+ of memory any loading causes the browser to become jittery. Any dynamic loading prevents me from scrolling, selecting text, typing text, etc... That is to say it's really fucking annoying.
6) You can't return to a previous location. When scrolling loads more and more, you can't instantly go back to where you were after you leave. If you close the tab and later want to go back, you have to scroll through everything again. You can't bookmark your location and it doesn't have a unique URL. This is extremely annoying as most mobile designs consider this a feature and not the loss of usability that it is. (Most websites get this wrong too. The most current page shouldn't be page 1 but page 233 or whatever. Going to the same page number should always give you the same results. It's really stupid to have every page change when new content is added. There's no way for users to track where anything is or to how much new content there is. Say I read pages 1-15. The next day I should read 15-17. But no, I've got to read 1-3 and there's no way to know that until I actually do it. I can't bookmark page 15 and start from there the next day.).

Finally,dynamic loading is worse for slow connections. People on slow connections load pages in the background or switch to a different task while the page loads. They're used to this, it's normal procedure when browsing. Dynamic pages break this. We see the page load quickly, but then constantly have multi-second pauses while consuming the content because the page keeps halting to load more content.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Number42]

I guess it's probably convention. That, and pre-specifying and image's dimensions prevent it from shifting text when it loads.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[allo]

the page does not move. alone is 0x0, then the image starts loading and the page is re-rendered, your currently focused point moves to make place for the loading image. Best if the image height is unknown until its loaded completely.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

Because image width and height are dependent on media size (@media selector to choose alternate-sizes, or omit images depending on browsers resolution), or language () will have it's images served from img/es/ and from img/en/.
This is purely done at the CSS level, as it's display is all formatting rather than content.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[BronsCon]

Came here to say whet 3 other people already did.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[BronsCon]

You seriously think the developers decided any of that? No, their decision was, ultimately, "implement this bullshit here, or leave and be asked to implement similar bullshit elsewhere". That, or starve. Also, there is nothing inherent in the use of javascript that affects security in any way; a site using multiple 3rd-party scripts and libraries and making tons of calls to external sources *might* introduce security vulnerabilities, but it's not a given, and a site simply using javascript to load a properly-sized or cropped image (e.g. to save bandwidth) isn't exposing *anyone* to a security vulnerability; if the image source turns out to be executable code and the browser decides to execute it, well, that's a browser issue and it would have happened just the same with a static HTML tag.

As for your claims re: performance, well, I agree it can be overdone. But you're wrong in cases where it is done right. Loading and rendering only the data that needs to change is *much* faster than loading and rendering the entire page and, done correctly just as bookmarkable.

I can't help the fact that the people who ultimately decide whether developers eat or not don't allow them the time required to implement things properly. My workaround was to quit working for someone else, and I've seen the quality of my own work improve immensely since then.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[BronsCon]

Oh, I have plenty of patience. I'm develop full-stack, I know the ins and outs of the industry, probably better than most, and I know not every page is going to load instantly, and it's not always the site's fault. However, it is well known that most people don't have anywhere near that level of patience.

47% expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.
52% of online shoppers claim that quick page loads are important for their loyalty to a site.
14% will start shopping at a different site if page loads are slow, 23% will stop shopping or even walk away from their computer.
64% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with their site visit will go somewhere else to shop next time.

Since when is giving people what they want a bad thing?

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[BronsCon]

1-3 are the result of shitty implementations. #4 is the result of you not checking to ensure the content actually loaded in the first place before you drop off the network; what if there was a server or connection issue? That would affect a static page just the same. It's akin to making a backup, but not bothering to verify that it completed successfully before unplugging the disk and putting it in storage; you don't blame the developer of your backup solution for your failure to follow bast practices, do you? #5 is a browser issue; try restarting it once in a while (I deal with this as well, and it also affects static pages). #6, well, I hate ever-scrolling sites as much as the next guy, I was never advocating for those in the first place; that said, there's also a right way to do that, but I can't say I've ever seen it done.

Finally,dynamic loading is worse for slow connections. People on slow connections load pages in the background or switch to a different task while the page loads. They're used to this, it's normal procedure when browsing. Dynamic pages break this. We see the page load quickly, but then constantly have multi-second pauses while consuming the content because the page keeps halting to load more content.

Well, that's not being done correctly, either, then. What *should* be done, so that users can immediately switch to a tab ans see content, is to load the content that is visible in the current viewport first, then content less than one full screen out of view, so it's there when the user starts scrolling. For many pages, that means just loading all the content, but for longer pages there will still be content left unloaded. The script loading the content should monitor load times and determine if a given bit of content is will take more than 0.5*[number of screens away] seconds to load, and load it early if it is.

Done correctly, the user shouldn't be aware of the delayed loading in most cases, and minimally aware of it in the worst case. Given that one side has bandwidth costs and the other side likely has either caps or costs, it's beneficial to everyone, but, again, only if it is done right. Which we can both agree it, typically, is not.

But, when you decry the practice in its entirety, you set yourself up to be ignored by the developer community as a whole. They hear someone who simply prefers to not have the feature at all; mind you, it's a feature their employer is insisting on having, so they're not allowed to listen to you. Instead, do what I'm doing, point out what is wrong with the implementations and pose solutions; then, the developers can listen.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[Antique Geekmeister]

> You seriously think the developers decided any of that?

Yes, they often do. Software developers often have to "sell" their projects at planning meetings. They can choose, and do, which features to emphasize.

> Also, there is nothing inherent in the use of javascript that affects security in any way; a site using multiple

It's complexity, and frequent use to cause the client to do anything other than a simple "pull" of content, create profound vulnerabilities.

> But you're wrong in cases where it is done right

These are increasingly rare. The Slashdot "beta" page is a wonderful example of abusively over-aggressive complexity, at the expense of legibility and usability.

> Loading and rendering only the data that needs to change is *much* faster

But this is not what is happening. It's being used to generate "churn" on the page.

Re:Social Networking is a mess

[BronsCon]

I'm not disagreeing with much of what you're saying, and I'm certainly not claiming it's done right more often than wrong. Quite the opposite, and I admit as much. My point is that it is wrong to decry the entire concept of on-demand loading simply because most people get it wrong; instead, try pointing out (as I am doing) how they're getting it wrong and how they can, instead, get it right. That's how you get people to listen; because whoever gave the project the green-light in the first place will simply instruct their developers to ignore anyone who doesn't like their pet feature, out of hand, but you might get through that filter by phrasing your dissent in the form of a feature request.

Re:Oh noes! The world is ending!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, it's not like Twitter is used by people all over the world or anything. It might not be a big deal, but you're still a moron.

Re:Oh noes! The world is ending!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, it's not like Twitter is used by people all over the world or anything. It might not be a big deal, but you're still a moron.

Because not being able to share Instagram links is going to end the world?

the problem with Twitter

[slashmydots]

140 characters ISN'T ENOUGH! That's not enough to say anything of substance. 300 characters is sufficient and almost as quick to read. If there was a service that came out with 300 characters as a limit, it would crush Twitter. They should get it through their thick heads that superior services will demolish their business if they don't listen to the number one complaint about Twitter from their users!

Re:the problem with Twitter

[inflex]

+1 to this.

I appreciate the terseness of Twitter's 140char limit, but it's a little *too* restrictive. I agree it makes people creative, but after a while the shine goes off that when you're just trying to get something important out there which could be better said with a few more characters rather than making people jump via a URL to somewhere else.

Maybe they should just abolish the limit entirely. Not like we're confined to the restrictions of SMS as the data carrier any more.

Re:the problem with Twitter

[Anonymous Coward]

That works until someone else comes out with a 310 character Twitter.

Re:the problem with Twitter

[gman003]

140 characters ISN'T ENOUGH! That's not enough to say anything of substance.

With you so far.

If there was a service that came out with 300 characters as a limit, it would crush Twitter.

And now you lost me. Twitter isn't for "anything of substance". It's either insubstantial stuff, or links to substantial stuff. People don't use it as, or want it to be, a place for "anything of substance". Leave that to the blogs.

Re:the problem with Twitter

[thegarbz]

TL;DR

Twitter is not about a thesis on your life. It's about a quick thought.

Re:the problem with Twitter

[marcansoft]

140 characters isn't enough ... in English. You should see the novels that Japanese people post on Twitter. Japanese is about 2x denser per character than English, so you can fit in a lot more stuff. I was amazed when I was able to compose an elaborate explanation for someone in Japanese and it still fit in one tweet (I'm learning the language).

Re:the problem with Twitter

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem too much of a beginner to have an opinion on the topic. Single UTF-8 CJK character takes up anywhere between 2 and 4 ascii. Since at least two characters make a word, and Japanese is not Chinese, so you need various bits in kana, it is just about as 'dense' as English. And the people who try to put more "meaning" end up impossible to understand, cf. newspaper feeds.

Re:the problem with Twitter

[Anonymous Coward]

Excatly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alf19unbtVs

Re:the problem with Twitter

[sscbankgk]

the problem of twitter is only text based tweet thats why now instagram is going on top of the lists in todays news visitor is going up of Instragram upto 50% more than 10% of twitter.twitter should update his rule to become a jungle lion of internet visit http://www.sscbankgk.in/

Re:the problem with Twitter

[aliquis]

Even removing all the people it's a reply to and the image or url links would had helped a lot.

At least when it become used for discussion rather than just saying something short.

Guess birds don't discuss.

Most useless service of the popular ones.

SMS always sucked too btw.

Re:the problem with Twitter

[marcansoft]

Twitter measures tweets in characters, not in bytes. Japanese is not 2x denser than English in bytes, but it's 2x denser than English in characters, and that's what Twitter cares about.

Try writing a few tweets (or tweet-sized snippets) in English and in Japanese sometime, see for yourself.

Re:the problem with Twitter

[swell]

An example of why the limit is useful. You might have said it in 140 characters but you wasted my time. Learn to use language effectively. [138 chars]

Re:the problem with Twitter

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter measures tweets in characters, not in bytes.

Then the obvious hack is to hijack 26*26 unicodes to store pairs of English letters, and tweet a link to a special font that people can install to see these pairs of letters.

Re:the problem with Twitter

[OrangeTide]

I don't know, 140 seems like a lot to me when you consider hobbies like six word stories. (not trying to plug the site, it was just the first one that came up in a search, there are a few others that do various numbers of word "stories").

Re:the problem with Twitter

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do the translation in Javascript just fine without requirng a special font.

Re:the problem with Twitter

[danknight48]

I agree, however, I got bored and wanted to find out how much potential storage twitter posts use on a daily basis.
500Million Tweets a day : http://www.internetlivestats.c...
* 140 bytes = 70Billion Bytes, or, 70Gigabytes roughly a day

If you double the char array to 280, thats only 140Gigabytes a day for just tweets.

Twitter have the money and network infrastructure to do this without question. I think its more a case that Twitter believes the 140 character limit is part of their "ethos", changing it would piss off all those users who wasted their life mastering the "shorthand of Twitter messages".

Re:the problem with Twitter

[Anonymous Coward]

Too lazy to log in, but that's a cool site.

You're right, you really can say quite a bit with only a few words if you really think about which words you're going to use.

Re:the problem with Twitter

[FunkSoulBrother]

Actually that took you 150 chars, considering your character count was part of your point. Better luck next time. [127 chars]

Re:the problem with Twitter

[physicsphairy]

One of the beauties about 140 characters is you have to think about what you want to say and how you say it. Editing for brevity often makes it punchier and better phrased. Many are the occasion when I have written a joke or insight for facebook, modified it for twitter, and then posted the twitter version in both cases because the twitter version was just better.

300 characters is not almost as quick to read it is quite clearly twice as long to read. For me, that would mean that instead of having time to follow 100 people on twitter I would only be able to follow 50. (Another of the other main features of twitter is allowing followers to interact with popular figures with their fans which I imagine also benefits greatly from a terser format.)

Personally, I think twitter has the potential to be one of the social media that survives in the long term. Yes it has obvious limitations but I get much more bang for my buck reading those condensed updates than I do using any other media platform. Sometimes when life gets busy I will quit other sites but twitter remains perfectly manageable and useful. It's great for news, politics, humor, and interacting with relatively large numbers of people. If you have an essay you need to share, you can link to it.

Some examples of how much you can pack into “It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” -- Albert Camus

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." -- Søren Kierkegaard

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep." -- William Shakespeare

Re:the problem with Twitter

[ultranova]

140 characters ISN'T ENOUGH! That's not enough to say anything of substance.

140 chars is enough for a pithy soundbyte. Those pay better than analysis. Blog if you want to write a manifesto.

Re:the problem with Twitter

[Anonymous Coward]

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

Re:the problem with Twitter

[Anonymous Coward]

It essentially only works out for marketing and news headlines. I think the vast majority of active Twitter users use it to market something, like the company they work for or themselves in some way. It doesn't seem like it's used much for any sort of real conversation.

Re:the problem with Twitter

[Sebby]

I agree with this too. I understand their desire to make sure people don't post things that are "too long", but 140 is too damn short! I way to potentially solve the problem: give one @-user mention and 1 URL link free - that don't count towards the limit; that would make conversations a lot more useful without adding stupid bloat.

Re:the problem with Twitter

[Anonymous Coward]

The asian languages get a lot more out of twitter. As it's still 140 characters, and you can say several paragraphs in Chinese/Japanese in 140 glyphs.
Finnish is also very dense in usage on twitter. English, with lots of aux words that are purely grammatical rather than informational is verbose to get clarity across rather than the minimally conjugated (ZH), or heavily congugated/inflected languages (FI), or informationally dense (ZH/JP -- kanji are very dense in meaning)

Re:the problem with Twitter

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter lets you post 140 32bit ints.
Thus, you get pretty much 140 Unicode CodePoints. So 140 latin characters, 140 CJK Characters, 140 codepoints.

Japanese is very dense, and much okurigana is optional (and generally is not used exept when it's not clear from context which of two valid readings should be used), and if you really want, many bits of grammatical kana can be written using Kanji as well, which everyone does learn in high-school. It's generally not common in general writing, but used often in headlines, to distinguish characters in a narrative without having to always quantify who'se speaking if their speaking style is similar to others (only difference between three characers dialog is their okurigana/kanji usage, so you can just have running quotations of three or four characters and it's not ambiguous in long-running dialogue that is otherwise not marked by names or supporting descriptive text), or other places where saving one or two glyph spaces is important/necessary.

Japanese can be, and often is very dense when it needs to be. Many Japanese words are one character, many are 2 characters, Several need to be "conjugated" (really, auxiliarry verbs need to be attached, like nai, tai, tagaru, mai, suru, made, ta, masu -- and each of these do have kanji and can be written out with just one kanji rather than okurigana)

English is less so, as many of the little words are not optional, and there's no adequate alternative to maintain succinctness without all the prepositions, conjunctions and other grammatic-function (syntactical vs informational) words, or relaying back to archaic words and orders which most people are exposed to, but the length of the latinate/greek words offset the savings of grammatic clarifications.

Also, summarizing apparently isn't taught in US schools anymore. It's a skill that's very important, to rewrite paragraphs as succintly as possible, getting across all the information, in as few characters as possible (for morse code translation originally). But that being taught is is good for parsing, relaying, and apparently for writing on twitter.

"You are too naive to opine. A Single CJK glyph is 2-4 bytes. 2+ characters make a word. JP is not ZH, kana is required. It's as dense as EN. People who employ more "meaning" yield impossible understanding."

It becomes not as fluid, but that's not the point of twitter.

decentralized tools

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally boycott centralized tools/services as much as I can. It's like eating junk food- or maybe even poison. You won't catch me on facebook, twitter, instagram, skype, or gmail. There are better options for which you don't have to sacrifice your freedoms and liberties. I use roundcube on a virtual private server for instance and xmpp for messaging. I also use golblin for youtube/facebook like replacement. And saying nobody is one these systems is just being lazy. Of course nobody is on them if you don't even attempt to get your family and friends to use them. I tell people I don't use skype and facebook. I then tell them what I do use. If they want to connect then great. There are lots of people I interact with both personally and for business without the utilization of such poor solutions.

fix pic.twitter.com if you want people to use it

[Anonymous Coward]

When I click a link to Instagram, it opens in a new tab. When I click a link to pic.twitter.com, and forget to hold ctrl/cmd it opens in the same tab, thus losing my place while i'm trying to read my timeline. Furthermore, zooming in on pic.twitter.com images is frequently broken. So, as someone who will be consuming these high-profile feeds, I would ask the users behind those feeds to please use Instagram or Imgur.

I in never post on ...

[raymorris]

I never post anywhere. I don't post on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Slashd ... oh crap.

Seriously though, I don't have a Twitter account. I looked at Twitter once or twice and I found it lacking either of two things that would make it useful. I might find it useful if I could either find stuff by topic or through a social NETWORK, but it doesn't seem to be made for searching or exploring, only for following a specific celebrity you've already chosen. I might be interested in feeds about a certain topic. Twitter doesn't do that. I might be interested in seeing what old friends are up to, finding all the people I went to high school with like Facebook. Maybe when I look up what my friend is doing I would click to see whatever happened to his hot sister.

Twitter may have changed since I last looked at it, or those functions might have been there, but not just intuitive how to do those things.

Re:I in never post on ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter definitely supports search. I've gotten noticed for tweets mentioning Cryptonomicon, Vonnegut, the Voyager Golden record...one of those has led to something resembling a friendship.

Re:I in never post on ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Twitter heavily, mostly in read-only mode. And you're right, it has some pretty major (and sometimes frustrating) limitations.

I find it useful for finding information about specific topics, like climate science. I follow a number of institutions and individual climate scientists, as well as journalists who write about energy and climate. Yes, it takes some work to build your list of accounts to follow, since there's no topic index or a decent search facility, but you can pretty quickly get a useful configuration by mining the follow lists of the first few accounts you track.

Re:I in never post on ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Twitter instead of SMS for alert messages,.This was because I had *three jobs in a row* where the chief architect and me, as a new lead systems guy, got more than 300 alerts per day for which the architects always said "just pay attention to the important ones", and refused to define what was "important". Then they'd flip out when I didn't respond to the "critical" alerts within 15 minutes, because Verizon insisted on waiting up to an hour to send all the messages as a flood, rather than when they were sent.

Twitter, at least, solved that problem by delivering the messages instantly and consistently, and providing reviewable web access to all the messages.

Re: I in never post on ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter is excellent for advancing my campaign for ethics in gaming journalism!

Re:I in never post on ...

[zlogic]

Twitter is useful for rapidly searching for news: accidents, network issues at a local ISP, realtime coverage of press conferences, that sort of thing. Also, many companies and websites have their own Twitter accounts and post news there - something like RSS replacement which is realtime and quick to browse (because messages are limited).

Re:I in never post on ...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not verizon's fault. That's fundamentally how SMS works.
SMS at the protoco8%l level is best effort, and delivery is not guaranteed or cancelled for up to 6 days.
If you have a full SS7 gateway, and know the destination of your end-user, you can manually set the routing the message will take, but otherwise, it goes through best effort routing to
a) your physical location as defined by area-code/exchange; then
b) from there, it gets routed to any phon-number-migration if you're not still on the original carrier for that number-block, then
c) it starts being routed back to your current location once known.
And the base protocol for SMS is still "store and forward", so towers are by designed to store it until it knows a good next hop to forward it to.
And as it's stateless, multi-message SMS are never guaranteed to be sent or arrive together (if all parts even arrive)

So, while this is normally only taking 30sec to 5min; it can, and very often occurs in the 1 to 24 hour range.
When I was still working on a SMS gateway product, my memory may deceive me slightly, but it was
    90% arrived in 5 minutes.
    96% 1 hr,
    98% 1 day.
    0.05% lost.
Which for 500,000 messages a day, meant that 10,000 messages took more than 24 hours to be delivered, and 250 were simply lost.

Multipart messages take longer (which is why most phones will send SMS of 3 messages as a Data Stream (MMS) rather than SMS.

Disintegration of the ecosystem

[Anonymous Coward]

The one thing these new online sultans who control the online fiefdoms forgot is that once the ecosystem breaks down a power vacuum is being created, and someone else will come in to fill that power vacuum

If they think they can keep on pushing the users they will regret it, for once the users abandon something they won't come back

Re:Disintegration of the ecosystem

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In this case, it's actually rather impressive how badly the twits appear to have forgotten.

"Hey, let's select a group of our most influential users and then annoy them with an unexpected and minimally useful nag screen when they try to use our service!" is a plan that sounds like a joke, not a strategy; but apparently twitter is now doing exactly that. Are they really gambling that all those users are just morons who are too stupid to realize that twitter has a given set of features; but would totally love to embrace them over a competitor they already use if only they are nagged enough? That seems...a trifle optimistic.

Impressive...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

"Twitter vs. Instagram" is a frankly solid entrant for 'year's most meaningless first world battle' and we haven't even made it out of January. Nice work.

Perspective

[pak9rabid]

Mark Zuckerberg: Neat *grabs popcorn*

Re:Perspective

[_xeno_]

Zuckerberg owns Instagram (well, Facebook owns Instagram), so Zuckerberg isn't exactly on the sidelines for this thing.

nothing wrong with this...

[Anonymous Coward]

instagram link to who knows what vs actual image in the twitfeed? no brainer, guys. #doitalreadyfuckinstagram

What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck is Instagram? And why should I care?

No use

[nospam007]

It's dead, Jim!

Question, not limited to Twitter:

[Anonymous Coward]

When does similar accidents become antitrust case? Is it based on the company valuation or size?

Twitters?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean that crap, inconsistent UI experience? Piss off you awful developers.
Come back when your website isn't as bad as a typical Myspace profile was.
That jarring experience between the new and old Twitter is hilarious. It shouldn't even exist!
Not to mention half the time you do not know if it is going to go between either of them. It is as bad as that god-awful Tumblr when it comes to clicking things. One click here, it could open up a gallery of images, one click there, it leaves the page you just spend 7 minutes scrolling through. GEE, great design guys.

Not to mention the awful bloat when scrolling forever. Add some pagination, you pricks!
Infinite scrolling is the worst cancer of the web, eating away at its very principles.

Everything that is wrong with Twitter, is wrong with Twitter. Well actually, I guess they did fix the server issues. Hey 1 point! You did good, kid.
People don't like Twitter for a reason. It is awful to use.

As an active user of both...

[Dixie_Flatline]

Twitter's request is asinine. Twitter is only set up to share with other Twitter users. When I post something to Instagram, I get to share with people on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. I do occasionally use VSCO and send things to each service individually (usually when I want to preserve the aspect ratio of an image; the lower res square that Instagram demands doesn't always work best).

If Twitter wants people to use their service for images, they have to make it easier to share outside of their network. People interested in sharing usually want to cover all their bases, not just one population.

But this is what's wrong with Twitter's current managementâ"they don't understand their own service and the people that use it. And they don't seem to get that if you want to grow, you have to reach outside of the network and bring people in, not broadcast to the people that are already there. I have friends that have joined Twitter because of my own active cross-posting (using third party tools)â"if Twitter made that part easier, maybe they could convince people to give them a shot. (That and doubling back and making third party clients easier to develop again; the official app is trash compared to Tweetbot. If they want ads, just make it part of the stream that the clients can't skip. It's not so hard.)

Tools, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it do a square crop at the image center, and apply a film-emulation filter for that "aughties" hipster look?

Re:fix pic.twitter.com if you want people to use i

[allo]

and saving them is not that nice, too. clicking just closes the lightbox

Offline reading

[tepples]

Imagine the article loading in its entirety, so you can start reading it, before there's even a single image tag on the page; then, well-written javascript popping the images in as you read. The content loads and renders faster and you have an over-all better experience, especialy if you happen to be on a mobile device or slow connection.

I have the opposite experience. Because my mobile device has no cellular Internet connection, I often load pages over Wi-Fi at home and then read them while riding public transit. If a page uses this "lazy loading" technique, none of the images will load when I get around to reading them.

Re:Offline reading

[BronsCon]

You mean you don't check to make sure there wasn't a server issue or some other issue preventing the content from loading before you drop off of the network? In that case, it really sounds like the content isn't important enough to you to warrant a complaint.

Re:Offline reading

[tepples]

You mean you don't check to make sure there wasn't a server issue or some other issue preventing the content from loading before you drop off of the network?

Usually I look at the first screenful of a document to see it is overwhelmingly more likely than not to have loaded. For most sites that don't use lazy loading, viewing the favicon and snippet of the <title> element in the browser's tab bar is enough. Or are you claiming that I ought to read the entire document before I read the document?

Re:Offline reading

[BronsCon]

I've encountered, even on popular sites (like Slashdot, for example) with no lack of resources, partially-loaded pages. By which, of course, I mean the text only partially loaded; the tail end of the HTML just never got to me. I never expected you to read, much less comprehend, anything; you certainly didn't do so with my comment, or you'd realize that a cursory scroll to the bottom to make sure there's a footer there would suffice. You know, some cursory check to ensure that the data you have and the data you think you have are, in fact, the same data.

If you can't be arsed to do that, then you weren't interested in reading that content in the first place. Right? Right.

Re:Offline reading

[tepples]

I understand what you're talking about. But on the sites I read daily, lazy loading happens at least an order of magnitude more often than interrupted HTTP connections. And scrolling to the end is problematic for two reasons. First, because placeholders are zero height, the page reflows after each image loads. And second, if I scroll too far, the comment widget loads on each page, which causes the machine to spend Internet bandwidth on downloading, and CPU time on laying out, comments from other readers rather than downloading and laying out other articles.

Re:Offline reading

[BronsCon]

And second, if I scroll too far, the comment widget loads on each page, which causes the machine to spend Internet bandwidth on downloading, and CPU time on laying out, comments from other readers rather than downloading and laying out other articles.

So, wait... you like lazy loading, then?

Re:Offline reading

[tepples]

On this particular site, I would prefer the images to load when I load the page and the comments to load when I follow the "View Comments" link. So I spent some time writing an RSS reader that implements this behavior, transforming the attribute that the lazy loading engine uses into the src= attribute and dropping elements outside the main article. But I'm an edge case; most people won't have the expertise for that option.

Re:Offline reading

[BronsCon]

You're also an edge case in that most people simply wouldn't care. The vast majority of users of any given site have connectivity while they're using the site.

That said, I do wonder what some of these implementations do when a user tries to print the page. Does the print view also lazy load, or does it load all of the content because, well, you know, it can't pop it on the printed page when you go to view it; it has to be there for printing.

In short, I guess I'm asking if you've ever tried the print view as a solution for your use-case, as it would have to be *severely* broken (in which case, let the site operators know, maybe they care enough to fix it) to not do pretty much exactly what you want. And if they're doing lazy loading and don't have a print view, well, then they're just asshole developers; in which case, you should probably let them know that, as well.

Tumblr

[tepples]

If there was a service that came out with 300 characters as a limit, it would crush Twitter.

You mean like Tumblr or Blogspot or LiveJournal or just about any other blogging platform?

superior services will demolish their business if they don't listen to the number one complaint about Twitter from their users

I thought the biggest complaint about Twitter was sockpuppetry. See Twitter use thirteen different characters.

Also too lazy to add a print option

[tepples]

The vast majority of users of any given site have connectivity while they're using the site.

Because most users think they need to be online just to read web documents, certain cellular companies in the US are raking in beaucoup bucks. Time is money, but I'd rather spend four hours of my time once and then not have to spend it again the rest of the year rather than waste $400 a year on a data plan.

I guess I'm asking if you've ever tried the print view

I never tried looking for it. I just tried five minutes ago, but it turns out that a randomly chosen article from Cracked.com doesn't appear to contain the word "print" at all. I guess what my homemade reader does is prepare (and cache) a printable version of new articles. I'm also aware of other sites such as Ars Technica that charge per year for access to printable versions.

And if they're doing lazy loading and don't have a print view, well, then they're just asshole developers; in which case, you should probably let them know that

I expressed my dissatisfaction with the site's lazy loading practice on the site's forum. But despite my best attempt at being thorough and polite, I got modded down.

Re:Also too lazy to add a print option

[BronsCon]

I'm assuming it's a user-moderated forum? In which case, welcome to true democracy. Sucks being a minority, eh?