Subscribe
Feb
24
Twitter Trivia Game
Filed Under Twitter | Leave a Comment
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed.
As you know I am a fan of Twitter, but I have yet to find a Twitter group participation thing - Frozen Peas, Twitter Dating (no seriously it exists), etc. - that I was in to. Until now that is…Dan Perry is launching Twitter Trivia. Dan will tweet trivia questions and tally points for the 3 first correct responses. At the end of March he will announce the winners and maybe even have some prizes. If Twitter Trivia takes off, Dan will potentially offer more features like a leader board, “I know more useless crap than you” badges and more. I love trivia and competing for pointless titles so follow FunTrivia to play and help ensure Twitter Trivia will be a success.
If you want to see my pathetic attempts at answers, follow me too.
For those of you who haven’t warmed up to Twitter yet, this might be a great time for you to try it out and connect with people who share a common interest in knowing what the Knights Who Say Ni demanded King Arthur bring them*. And above all, have some fun!
*The answer is a shrubbery of course
Feb
16
In a recent article called If You Can’t Let Go, Twitter, author Michelle Slatalla recounts her failed attempts to get her family to use Twitter to communicate more efficiently. Slatalla tried to recruit her husband and three daughters - 18, 16 and 10 years old. Of the four recruits, her husband was the only person that managed to slightly grasp the concept. Her 18 year old was quoted saying “It’s too complicated” and her 16 year old said the site was “confusing”. Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, responded saying “We do have a lot of work to do to make it simpler and clearer to use”.
Confusing? Too complicated? Make it simpler and clearer to use? What could be simpler than typing 160 characters (or less) and hitting update? Twitter doesn’t suffer from feature bloat or an over complicated UI. I understand people not “getting” Twitter if they’ve never used it. I even understand people not liking it once they try it. But not even being able to figure out how to use it is just asinine.
I imagine that Slatalla’s children are not as dense as this article makes them seem. Instead, I assume her children were not interested in Twitter because their mother wanted them to use it. If my mom had suggested we text each other when I was 16 I may have reacted like her children did to Twitter. In a month they will probably be twittering away to their friends and acting like they discovered Twitter all on their own. That should provide Slatalla with some material for another article.
Feb
13
Information is so readily available that it is incredibly frustrating when I can’t find something I am looking for online. That doesn’t happen too frequently, but last night was a great example. I was watching an episode of Bravo’s Make Me A Supermodel (MMAS going forward) in which the model-wannabes had to walk for a designer at New York Fashion Week. 
I fell in love with the dress shown here and wanted to know where I could get it. I knew the designers name (FORM), that they were based in New York and that they had been featured on the show. That should be enough to find their website right? Wrong.
I searched numerous combinations of FORM, clothing line, New York, Make Me A Supermodel, clothes and designer to no avail. I did find many blogs mentioning the label being on the show, but none of them linked to the FORM website. Probably because they couldn’t find it either. So I dug through the MMAS website and found that the full name of the label is FORM by Terry Jam, but still no link to their website. First and foremost they should have negotiated a link from Bravo to their site. How many people do you think went to Bravo’s site after they watched the show so they could check out FORM’s clothes and dead ended there?
Searching for “Form by Terry Jam” got me to their websites, jerrytam.com and formnewyork.com. Unfortunately the websites are basically useless on many levels. First, from an optimization standpoint, the sites blew my mind…or just blew. Just about everything they could possibly make an image, they did. Even the bio text is an image. Most of their page titles consist of one word such as “information” or even worse their abbreviations for the collections such as “FWO8INTRO”. FORM is apparently affiliated with scatolaus.com, an entirely Flash site. Maybe they got advice from Scatolaus on how to develop websites so exclusive no one can find them, like LA bars in Swingers.
I could go on for days about all the things wrong with the site from an optimization angle but you get my point. The sites also couldn’t be harder for a consumer to navigate if blind monkeys developed them. In order to find the dress I apparently have to know what collection it’s in. I understand the designer’s need and want to have the collections viewable as a whole. But for usability sake, it would also make sense to tag each item by type (dress, pants, scarf) and color so people find the style of items they are interested in through a simple search. Maybe this will happen when they launch their online store this month (doubtful) “with newest online e commerce site“.
Obviously I found the dress on the site, so why am I still so annoyed (other than the fact I couldn’t buy it)? Because FORM probably paid good money to have those sites made. And they probably have no idea their sites blow or that they are missing out on potential customers. Now, while I believe that anyone that is purchasing a website for their business should do their due diligence and research what they are buying, I also believe that creating a website as carelessly as these ones were is negligent. I’m not saying you have to optimize a site for a client that isn’t paying for it, but you shouldn’t build a site that is just a painting hung in a dark hall of the internet. If even for your own pride and reputation, you should create sites that have a baseline standard for quality and usability (as I have said before). Creating a site that does nothing for your client won’t likely get them to return when it’s time to upgrade. However, if the site you create gives them a taste of what they could get, they may come begging for more.
Feb
5
Two of My Favorite Things About Twitter
Filed Under Twitter, Video | 8 Comments