Amidst all the exciting and controversial new directions Twitter is taking since they’ve been announced at the Chirp conference, one stands out: Ev Williams admitting that “Twitter is too hard too use”, even mentioning that the phrase “I don’t get Twitter” is the second suggested search in Google.

After all these years of the pundits identifying Twitter’s strength and eureka moment to be its simplicity, Ev’s statement says a lot about the company. They could have skipped over this detail or worded it in some other way, but talked about it anyway. Sincerely and transparently.

We’ve known this for a long time, but it was growing too fast for us to address these issues.

There are several lessons rolled in here. Despite all of Twitter’s growth in usage and features, they still don’t want to drop the ball on simplicity even if other products probably would have, because they can afford to.

But simplicity doesn’t only mean keeping the number of features at a minimum; it also means being intelligent enough to anticipate what users need. The way Twitter is built makes it into “different things for different people”—hence the explosion of 3rd-party apps and the creation of its own jargon. Retweeting, hashtags, trending topics, recommended users, and lists were all created arbitrarily by the community later on integrated as real features. Now the company is pushing further in location awareness, mobile, infrastructure, and APIs.

As long as there’s this open dialogue among the founders, the users, and all the developers, Twitter will remain as inspiring and innovative as ever.

Related reading:

• Why do blogs screenshot tweets?
• Two extreme approaches to social media, which side are you on?
• rel, rev, and HTML5
• Is Simler a new social networking model or something more familiar?
• Web Trend Alert: Virtual business card sites

I can’t help comparing Twitter Images (tweetimag.es), which extract a user avatars with just a URL to the more established universal avatar provider Gravatar, which is dependent on an email address.

While there are certainly more email users than any web service out there, Gravatar isn’t quite as buzzworthy as Twitter; it’s a more specific service after all. However, because of this Twitter Images service, extracting an avatar is much easier than Gravatar’s implementation and could gain more traction as a legitimate avatar solution on blogs. I won’t be surprised if Twitter scooped up this little project for itself.

On the other hand, being dependent on Twitter—whose popularity still causes downtimes to this day—may not be such a good idea for critical endeavors, and it may be more advisable to go for the service whose sole business is avatars (or if possible, identity management).

Gravatar and Twitter don’t have to be adversaries. I’d want Gravatar to take the high road and embrace all the popular identity channels, be it Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, MobileMe, OpenID, etc. Or should one leave the multiple avatar sources feature to the developers just like you can have different login and identity options on blogs and web services? Perhaps Mix Online’s Incarnate is the right way to skin the cat.

Related reading:

• Web Trend Alert: Virtual business card sites
• Holding a conference? Spice it up with these geeky ideas
• Beyond logos or faces
• Will CSS logotypes replace image-based ones?
• Why do blogs screenshot tweets?

I hope the likes of Smashing Magazine or some fabulous curator of web design history would come up with an in-depth study illustrating how web design has evolved over the last ten years. Timelines like this and this could help with that, but still needs mention of developments like:

• the downfall of <table> layouts in favor of semantic markup
• CSS sprites
• the growth of web typography, from sIFR to @font-face
• Art Direction in web design
• mobile web design
• the HTML 5 Superfriends
• which website or company popularized which design pattern, from the glossy, candy-colored “Web 2.0 look” to the sleeker, more dramatic “Apple look” (though something tells me Apple is responsible for both)

Here‘s another approach to the timeline, and is more of a Q&A over the years, and anybody can ask and answer. It also hasn’t been updated since ’04, as it was part of the 2005 conference, A Decade of Web Design. Jakob Nielsen also did a backtrack that same year.

I’d also like to look forward. This prediction post is quite adequate (with pictures it would be perfect). I think this passage sums up what’s happened in the past decade and what will happen in the next:

While most these technological improvements tend to make the web a more and more homogenous place, at the same time, there is a tendency to create highly curated design setups that use different designs for each article.

There will always be a dichotomy between standardization and specialization on the Web but it’s only lately that we’ve been able to do so with less crap, more elegance. And I can’t wait to see how doing those two things evolve into even more exciting things in 2010 and beyond.

Need more crystal balls and time capsules? See also:

• The Decade in Design
• Trends for the 2010s (graphic)
• Top Internet Trends 2010: A Guide To The Best Predictions From The Web Part 1 & Part 2

Related reading:

• Twitter tweet embedding finally arrives, but is it any better?
• Why do blogs screenshot tweets?
• Ten years of creating a better web: Google and A List Apart
• Opera teaches good web design with its Web Standards Curriculum
• No-nonsense web design references to bookmark

So we know there’s a backlash of the list article format going on. And we know that the general cure to the “disease” is to go for quality, not quanity. Discussions instead of a bombardment of links and screen grabs. Though of course, that’s debatable since if I’m a designer looking for these resources in the first place, I’d find them indispensable anyway.

The thing is though, if I am looking for that perfectly tiled background pattern or that brilliant CSS3 button tutorial, how do I scour through oodles of these lists to find exactly what I need? How would I know from my list of bookmarks or starred Google Reader items that the blog post titled “50+ Fresh CSS Techniques, Tutorials and Resources” is the one I need, and not “5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers And Developers”? These titles are super vague and because the posts are super long, it’s now finding a needle in a haystack.

List article authors need to raise the stakes and add more useful features. A table of contents, for example, that summarizes all the items in the list. Tags too, that should describe the article with keywords as specific as possible.

Perhaps someone can even create an aggregator of these lists, with proper categorization and search. It could even be—gasp—the next “CSS gallery”.

Why fan the flames and tolerate list articles? Again, I know what they’re useful for. They’re a convenient way to check up on what’s new in the design blogosphere, and you can never have too many resources. They’re certainly taking up space for thought-provoking discussions, but the demand is high and we need them too. We might as well rally to improve the format instead of banish it.

The same goes for CSS galleries and image bookmarking sites. I welcome the large amount of sites because sometimes you can never have enough. But how I browse through and experience their content can definitely be improved.

I’m not just talking about aesthetics or readability here. I’m talking about what can be considered new forms of content with sub-content that can describe and classify them:

• the list article as a type of resource list that contains different downloadable files (e.g., brushes, vectors, photos), tutorials, screenshots, etc.
• the CSS gallery as a type of website list that contains different websites classified according to style, site type, color, CMS, topic, number of pages, designer, etc.
• the image bookmarking site as a type of image list that contains different images classified according to style, image type, color, resolution, designer, etc.

Is it possible to create new content formats for these? People have managed to do so many things with Twitter tweets, and Microformats are moving forward at a steady pace, so why not see if we can remix and mashup larger types of content, like ones contained in blog posts?

One of the biggest problems on the Web is that we’re marking things up on such a low level, while tapping into XML structures isn’t as easy to do yet. But imagine if we can make all these resources so much more organized and findable. Maybe people wouldn’t need to complain about list articles and CSS galleries as cliches then.

Related reading:

• The list article backlash
• Web trend alert: image bookmarking sites
• The ugliest websites in the world
• Should Tumblr stay simple or does it need to grow up?
• Unmatched Style’s video podcast: the next step for inspiration galleries?

Tim O’Reilly predicts a war is coming, one where we are at the mercy of the internet giants like Google, Facebook, and Apple: they stop making the services we are so highly dependent on interoperable.

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

Chris Messina fears something similar as well: the death of the URL, as new formats for delivering web content are abstracting the website-going experience and letting ourselves relinquish control.

By removing our ability to navigate, choose, and share freely — these app stores are exchanging our freedom for a promise that they’ll keep us safe, give us everything we need, and do all the choosing of what’s “good enough” for us — all starting at ninety-nine cents a hit.

I know that if we always look at things with a worst case scenario in mind, we’ll never get any work done from here on out. But better to worry now than when it becomes impossible to undo things. I like how the Web is now, no matter how chaotic and crap-filled it can be.

That said, if the URL disappears, I know few people would be troubled by it, and an overhaul of the system may be needed anyway.

And as for the giants bullying us into a corner, it makes me wish the Long Tail would stand a chance.

Related reading:

• Where Is The Google Web Browser?
• WebKit: One browser engine to rule them all?
• Web Trend Alert: Virtual business card sites
• Two extreme approaches to social media, which side are you on?
• Top 10 Web 2.0 Winners

Here’s another technology being given the Real Time Web treatment: RSS. There’s PubSubHubbub (PuSH), created by the mother of all search engines and there’s rssCloud, created by the father of RSS. You can tell just by the people behind both projects that this is a Big Deal.

I won’t get into the technical details—mostly because I can’t—but these two protocols are built on the same idea of push notifications instead of pull, which is the current setup. Feed aggregators won’t have to check every now and then for any updates; they’ll come right in when they’re published.

The score seems to be in PubSubHubbub’s favor right now, and it certainly calls attenion based on name alone. But Dave Winer had the idea as early as 2001. And who knows what will happen in the next few months.

What matters is the feed reading system is getting a much needed upgrade especially with all this talk of it being dead. RSS? Dead?

Like Bwana, I scoff at people who run through the streets proclaiming “RSS is dead! Long live Twitter!” Aside from the obvious non-parallel comparison between a protocol and a web app, he explains it nicely:

Those who claim RSS is dead don’t realize their newfound love for Twitter would be moot if it were not for RSS. Breaking news on Twitter comes from two main sources in my mind: websites and personal experience. For tech news, I doubt there is much personal experience for news unless there’s a conference or an event. Most juicy, 0-day news comes from websites. These websites often have a… wait for it… RSS feed. The race to post tech news first on Twitter usually stems from who can refresh their RSS reader the fastest.

So here’s to RSS: I’m not sure what the Web would do without you. Pretty sure that’s how many feel about Twitter too, but let’s talk again when it goes from webapp/API level down to the protocol level. And when it scales properly, of course.

Postscript: Both PuSH and rssCloud support Atom. RSS and Atom are both feed delivery mechanisms, but you won’t see people yelling “feeds are dead!” or “Atom is dead!”, as they have ignored any distinctions among the three for ages now. So for the sake of simplicity I mentioned only RSS above.

Related reading:

• The next revolution will come in waves. Google Waves.
• Should Tumblr stay simple or does it need to grow up?
• Feed Awareness (or the lack thereof)
• Why do blogs screenshot tweets?
• Where Is The Google Web Browser?

One of the most ambitious efforts to come out of the Googleplex (or anywhere, really) in ages is Google Wave, a real-time messaging, sharing, and collaborating service unveiled last week. Finally, Google’s crack at the Real-Time Web. We’ve been waiting.

Google’s Real-Time Web

You might recall ReadWriteWeb proclaiming the big G missed the boat on that, as Twitter rules over real-time search these days. However, Wave makes one realize there is more to the real-time web than 140-character messages.

It’s a new way of doing things. It’s decentralized, open-source, and poised to take over online communications the way email has, since it’s built as a fundamental protocol. But it’s not even just “the new email”, it lets you do a lot more than that. It was built to service needs knowing the capabilities of the Web today:

Ezra Pound once wrote: “”The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.” And elsewhere: “Make it new!”

Even more than the application itself, I love the way Wave doesn’t just build on what went before but starts over. In demonstrating the power of the shared, real-time information space, Jens and Lars show a keen understanding of how the cloud changes applications.

When I saw Wave for the first time on Monday, I realized that we’re at a kind of DOS/Windows divide in the era of cloud applications. Suddenly, familiar applications look as old-fashioned as DOS applications looked as the GUI era took flight. Now that the web is the platform, it’s time to take another look at every application we use today, and ask the same question Lars and Jens asked themselves: “What would this look like if we invented it today instead of twenty-five years ago?”

This is not another reboot of the social network format the way Google redid email with Gmail and redid search with Google Search. But it does feel this is the way social interactions on the Web were supposed to be. Aren’t you tired of signing up over and over for the hottest new web service, OpenID/etc. not withstanding?

I love the diversity and downright chaos of the Internet, but the future has got to be seamless integration between all things. Text, photos, videos, blog posts, polls, calendars, petitions, lyrics, jokes, LOLcats, whatever.

Now when Google says real-time, it means your friend’s message appears on your screen by the character, instead of a “your friend is typing…” notice as you twiddle your thumbs. It also means you can reply to any part of your friend’s message, edit any part of a document, and replay exactly how everything happened when you’re done. See video above. It’s brilliant.

Terrifying ramifications?

That’s barely scratching the surface. I’m not sure if the protocol will succeed—not everybody lives in real-time online, or can handle this many features (see Twitter).

If it does succeed, it might become too successful that users are addicted, possibly trapped in this real-time space. We continue to blur the line between the real and the virtual, and even if at this point we can tell the difference between the two, will we ever reach the point of being “too” connected, transparent, hyperreal?

I’m not even sure if we should be trust yet another invention from Google—there has to be something in it for them, right?

Are you terrified yet? I think I am, but I’m pretty excited too.

Related reading:

• Why do blogs screenshot tweets?
• Two extreme approaches to social media, which side are you on?
• RSS goes real-time; is not dead
• Is Simler a new social networking model or something more familiar?
• 3 nifty browsing features that should be on every site

Right now I’m listening to a live piano performance by Imogen Heap (she calls it “piano noodlings”) being broadcast over USTREAM, announced over Twitter a few minutes ago.

Several hundred other people are watching too, and it’s a new kind of musical experience thanks to the real-time Web. People have spoken of it before, and this is a fascinating aspect of it.

We can all sit down in front of the computer in our individual homes and listen to an Imogen Heap concert, live, together. It’s not quite the real thing, of course, but it’s different. Good different. It’s simple, spontaneous, and inclusive.

I can’t wait to see what other artists and other game-changers come up with in this next era of the Web.

Related reading:

• The next revolution will come in waves. Google Waves.
• RSS goes real-time; is not dead
• Facebook chooses consistency over rounded corners
• 3 nifty browsing features that should be on every site
• Will Twitter avatars render Gravatar irrelevant?

Short URLs

Shorter URLs are all the rage these days because of Twitter and its 140-character limit. If you’re one of the top sites on the web is practically mandatory for you to roll out your own URL shortening system. Ars Technica, for example, whose official URL is arstechnica.com, also has arst.ch. If you’re on a CMS like WordPress, you’re advised to give out the post ID permalink instead of the keyword-rich permalink of your blog post for the same reason.

Not too long ago, SEO and usability experts were on the same side and recommended readable URLs. Now that Twitter is the new internet marketing (I think they call it social media now) battlefield, the rules changed. When the next killer Web 3.0 app comes out, will we compromise and adjust once again?

But then again, has the Web ever stood still? Maybe I just thought it was beginning to.

WebKit’s CSS animations and scrollbars

You can now style scrollbars and perform animations using CSS in WebKit browsers.

I remember when Internet Explorer started to support scrollbar styling and almost every personal site took advantage of it. But then they grew out of it and were told by the gurus not to mess with the browser chrome.

I also remember <blink> and <marquee>.

But then again, “styling scrollbars isn’t messing with the chrome anymore than styling a button is.” Would the world be a saner place if browsers behaved the same way and all looked alike?

DiggBars

Digg has come out with its own version of the external page framing mechanism which they call the DiggBar.

Said mechanism is nothing new, and never really died out even to be considered a comeback, but Digg has a powerful following by all that which is noisy in the blogosphere to build a considerable amount of buzz. And no matter how you look at it, framing external pages is still framing, reminiscent of the era when HTML framesets were considered cool.

But then again, perhaps in this new era listening to the clamor of the crowd is no longer a fluke, but a very real way to improve one’s business.

Related reading:

• Why do blogs screenshot tweets?
• Twitter tweet embedding finally arrives, but is it any better?
• This week in web design & development podcasts
• The real reason IE6 isn’t dead yet
• The list article backlash

And yet at the same time, it also feels like things have only started falling in place—ubiquitous and high-speed connections, uncompromised content delivery on mobile devices, live streaming and other real-time services, data portability and APIs, and so on. Some feel that the Web can be better, but it has to be rebuilt from the ground up:

Instead of merely jury-rigging fixes into the existing Internet, Peterson and Rexford believe much can be learned about possible improvements by designing a new network from the ground up — one that parallels the existing Internet, on which researchers can run their most innovative experiments.

If we have to revamp the Web it’s better to do so now, or sooner rather than later.

Maybe the infrastructure itself doesn’t need the overhaul, but only certain features. Thomas Baekdal considers a new domain system. Internet Explorer is reportedly getting a brand new browser rendering engine, taking a cue from Google Chrome. And dare I include the Web 2.0 phenomenon, which to its credit wasn’t a complete fad: we got YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter from it, after all. All address different aspects of the Web, but each one’s a game-changer in its own right.

The key here is people are rethinking rather than building on top of things. But will it come full circle, only for people to realize too late that starting from scratch was a much better way? The endeavor feels so large and drastic that it’s too daunting to even consider.

Related reading:

• The future of the Web may not be free
• The circus continues: Google Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer
• Short URLs, WebKit’s CSS animations & scrollbars, DiggBars: everything old is new (and hip?) again
• People don’t know what a web browser is (but first: IE, Firefox, & Opera updates)
• Google plays and promotes with Chrome Experiments (plus! browser updates)