Techmeme, Twitter, Quora and mini link-farms.

Ryan Spoon wrote something I've been increasinglty thinking for a week or so about the New Techmeme, and it's pointing to Twitter and Quora:

Techmeme has been making an increased effort to move beyond blog posts by integrating Twitter and Quora conversations. Conceptually it is attractive, but figuring out how to cohesively merge the different conversation types is quite difficult.

Techmeme will test their way into the right solution… and I give them credit for integrating Twitter beyond a side-bar widget (most attempts)… but I am not sure examples like this add value to the experience (other than getting to headlines very quickly):
He goes on to show a conversation on the board that was a bit circular and unhelpful (the inevitable impact of pointing to a microblog and an aggregator if one is not carefu)l. Curiously enough, he then looks at yesterday's gerfuffle with various Uber-reaching Twitterclients, and felt they they had kinda got it right...

And as it broke on Friday, there was a mixture of real-time commentary, news and updates from the companies themselves (namely Twitter / @Support and Bill Gross).

Whether in real-time or as a digest, Techmeme was the best way to follow. Why? Because Techmeme had figured out how to appropriately (and immediately) combine the different news sources and formats… most of which was blurred between news and tweets.

...which was interesting because just before I read his article I was putting pen to paper to observe similar frustrations to him, but I was writing about the frustration of navigating around the news item he felt was "getting it right". Having compared the two experiences I think I know why - when he was writing it was a breaking item on a sidebar (see below)



Great, pithy early warnings. However, by the time I woke up in the UK, it had mutated to this:




That's Techmeme the same as it's ever been, I hear you say.....amd on the surface, you are right - but now click on "expand discussion" on that big story from TechCrunch....this is about 1/4 of the expansion ( I have highlighted the twitter input in yellow, its nigh on half the input - btw I missed one, fourth from bottom):





The issues I had were the following, from a user experience point of view - firstly, Twitter:

(i) There is a hell of a lot more stuff there now to wade through, and that real estate is precious - I want to read the blogs I like and trust, and scanning through the longer twts (some of which look like txt speak) is more jarring than blog post headings in my opinion

(ii) Personally, I don't find the twts high value, as they all tend to say roughly the same thing, which typically I've already seen on Twitter or wherever - there are only so many ways you can say "ZOMFG Twitter kicked off UberTwitter go here [link]." in 140 characters, and there is precious little analysis in a twt after you've read 2 or 3

Secondly, Quora - I am not sure of the wisdom of an Aggregator linking to another Aggregator, because - in my experience anyway:

(i) You sort of just get the same news review you have just read on Techmeme again (especially as many of the Quora participants have typically made a Twitter post that has already been picked up on Techmeme), and then you have to go scanning the Quora page to see something new and its just sloppy seconds of the same stuff (in this case anyway, maybe other discussions are better).

(ii) I prefer different aggregators for news - Hacker News, Slashdot for example - to me Quora is just FriendFeed 2.0 - same people (who are everywhere anyway), same conversations, and with the interconnected twts and often blog posts from the same people all linking to their other posts in different media it all became a bit like a "mini link farm" around this story in my opinion (I should draw the lines between the items that are interlinked on the above page)

But to take Ryan's point, clearly there is a need to bring the real time into Techmeme - my take on it is this:

(i) Twitter feed is useful when Ryan saw it - on the sidebar as an early warning. less so when I saw it later, spamming the picture. IMO Twitter's value is speed, not content. I wonder if there is some way of killing tweets after they have been on a while, or showing them as a separate grouping / having a "show no tweets" filter option?

(ii) Quora is both easier - I can ignore it - and harder: I really question the use of another aggregator as a major news source, because the screen real estate and my attention are the limited resources. I would probably prefer to see it as a another link to the main story in the commentary section (like Slashdot sometimes is) rather than a destination in its own right.

But it is an interesting UI/UX question, and like Ryan, I think if anyone can get it right its the Techmeme team, but the fundamental value Techmeme has had to me is that it reduces, not increases the stuff I have to wade through...until now. . I shall watch with interest.