2009-08-05
post/156424512
I’ve probably left it so late that nobody cares, but here’s my tuppence on the front page redesign.
Firstly, I hate that the sign in form is now hidden by default; it stops Keychain filling in the password. The old login page is still available and works, but for how long?
Secondly, obviously in pulling search to the forefront Twitter are continuing to build on the Summize acquisition and the value they (and others) see in trends.
Thirdly, it looks like trending topics now get a description written. It’s fairly obvious this is being done manually. For one thing, they take a while to show up. For another, topics that are evidently referring to the same thing can have somewhat different descriptions.
Fourthly, it’s annoying that logged-in users have no way to access the historic trending topics or the descriptions of them. The former is a bit tricky to fix, but a title attribute on the links in the trending topics sidebar would be nice. (The descriptions would also be useful via the API.)
Generally, for all I share the suspicion that trending topics aren’t particularly insightful, they probably do work as a hook into the service.
