2009-02-27
Microplaza: a micro-review
While idly surfing Twitter search trends, I noticed a Techchrunch article on MicroPlaza was a trending topic. I was intrigued, as I’d been considering ways of getting links out of Twitter for months, and I managed to get an invite code and have a quick look around.
MicroPlaza shows all the links that have been posted by people I follow, with any URL shortening expanded out. The main page of the service is the timeline view (which, as you see, can be shared with others). I think the best comparison is with my delicious network page, which shows a similar sort of information, but makes some different - and, to me, preferable - decisions.
Firstly, the MicroPlaza view includes a screengrab. This has the potential to be quite informative, but it also takes up a lot of space. Magnolia (RIP) used to do something similar, and I think it’s part of the reason I never used the service in anger- I want something like this to be quite information dense.
Secondly, the delicious view doesn’t do any deduping- if ten of my network post a link, it shows up ten times, in the order they posted it. In contrast, MicroPlaza shows each link complete with a list of all the twitter users who’ve posted it, which is a nice idea, but it can also mean that I can’t always see which of my contacts actually posted it. There is an “expand” button, but it’s a bit of a pain to have to use it (and wait for the twitterers to be fetched) before finding the person.
Personally I’d love to see options to lose the screengrab, and to improve the visibility of the people I follow. (I don’t really care about the rest of Twitter, except possibly as a source of statistical ‘everyone is interested in this’ information.)
MicroPlaza uses the still-in-beta OAuth support to allow posting, which is good (and avoids the password antipattern). However, it doesn’t use the same support to pull out links from people you follow who keep their updates private (such as, well, me). As Tom pointed out on IRC, privacy makes the entire site a lot harder to build:
they’d also then end up with storing your replies once for everyone who followed you, or just once and having to very closely track the twitter follow network to not leak privacy everywhere
Still, for all my quibbles, this really is a lot better than the previous Twitter URL services, like twitturly, which surface popular links across the network, rather than the stuff I actually care about. When a service comes along that’s denser, and includes (and respects) private updates, I can see myself using it a great deal. For now, MicroPlaza looks handy for catching up when I’m too busy to read every tweet and follow every link.
