Okay, so I’m seriously behind the curve here. Almost embarrassingly so, but that’s fine. I’ve spent a fair amount of time reading about Twitter and even playing with their search engine (search.twitter.com) to see where this very popular tool is headed. Tonight I jumped in, signed up and am taking twitter for a spin for real.
First thoughts? It’s actually been a little frustrating. Which seems crazy, because there’s not much too it! I’m sort of thrashing around in the user interface — and it reminds me of my first encounter with MySpace way back when. So what’s bugging me specifically? Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s a Twitter, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how to correctly add a picture to my profile. I know, Web 2.0 101. The interface is acting buggy. You go to your profile, look around for an “add picture” link (don’t find one) — and then look at your actual photo icon and notice that it says “Add a photo” there. Hmm. Duh. Click on it and you get a normal looking tab/nav bar that has “Picture” as an option. Click on it and you’re presented with a run-of-the-mill looking text field and “browse” button — which is standard fare for this kind of functionality. You click on “browse”, you’re taken to your OS’s (mine’s OS X) normal window where you can select a file for upload. (I happened to choose a sweet one of me celebrating “Mustache Monday”, here in McCall. Hey, it’s MY profile.) All seems to be going to plan. You do that, upload the photo, by hitting “save” and then in a few seconds, the interface does a little Web 2.0 ajaxie thing and says “That’s a nice picture!”. The problem is, there’s no picture in my profile. It’s not there. It’s as if nothing was uploaded. I’ve retried a dozen times. Tried it with both Safari and Firefox. Tried it with a different Mustache Monday file. Confirmed my Mustache Monday files meet the file size restrictions. I can’t figure it out. I’ve come to the conclusion that this has to be a problem on Twitter’s end and will give them 24 hours to fix this bug. Can’t be me!
Before I came to the “it must be a bug” conclusion, I did refer to Twitter Help. More weirdness (to me). You hit the “Help” link that’s in the top nav and you’re taken to a Twitter Support page — which looks and works fine (except nothing about the photo upload issue), however, when you’re done with “Help”, it’s not intuitive how to get back to your profile. I can see that I’m still logged in as “sraygun”, but that account name isn’t linked and there’s no link on the page that allows you to get back. The original navigation is gone, so you’re only option is to use the back button or change the URL from “http://help.twitter.com/entries” to “http://twitter.com” (like I did).
It would have been so easy for Twitter to keep their normal nav structure so that users don’t have to think about how to get back from Help. This omission clearly isn’t keeping the service from being outrageously popular, but I think it’s a riot that this hasn’t been better architected. Reminds me a bit of MySpace’s old, super-clunky error messaging when you submitted incorrect login credentials — “You Must be Logged-In to do That!”
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UPDATED 3/17/2009
Boom! There’s my profile picture. Interestingly enough, the much maligned profile-picture functionality ended up working auto-magically at some point in the past 24 hours. Perhaps these images go into a holding/review queue for human screening? Sounds expensive, but they do say that “porn” is not allowed — and since I’ve yet to run across a “wisdom of the crowd” feature that lets users flag content as appropriate, perhaps human certification is their current model. Regardless, if that’s the case, it would be easy for them to message it so users don’t think something is broken.
