Twitter Blocks, huh.
So, Twitter just launched Twitter Blocks. I actually wrote a long diatribe on how confusing it is because the only explanation Twitter gives you is this:
Blocks are recent statuses from users and the people they follow (and the people THEY follow…)
Wow! That’s so clever! And so helpful!
Anyhoo, after looking at it for awhile, I think I have it figured out. There’s an orange row of columns directly down the middle - those represent the string of the most recent twitters of people you follow (the blue blocks represent your own tweetse). That is, if you click down that row it will be the same sequence of twitters as you’ll see on your home page, most recent first. If you click on anyone else and load that neighbors block, you’ll see the new block from his perspective. So you’ll see the string of twitters that he’s been looking at.
The height of each column is how long ago it was. The taller it is the longer ago it was. Kind of annoyingly, it quickly goes off the charts so columns older than a day or so can not be clicked on.
So, let’s say that the orange blocks (representing your tweet timeline) goes from west to east. Each block on the way east is the next older tweet. the blocks north and south of each orange block represent tweets after (to the north) or before (to the south) of all the tweets in the timeline of the twitterer who’s block you are on. Make sense? It’s easier to see when you’re looking at the app.
The app is kind of cool, representing time as well as buddies. I think they could have done a better job explaining it, since it was non-obvious to me at first and second glance. I’m sure some people will immediately understand it, but I suspect a lot of people won’t.
It freaks out a little bit if you leave it in the background and do other stuff in another browser, too. But overall, it’s neat. It’s a pretty app for sure, but I doubt I’ll be using it much to explore other things. I think to some degree it sacrificed functionality for beauty. It could do some simple things like popup the actual text of the twitter as you mouse over it (in addition to the profile picture) and then make clicking on it refocus the app on that person. Right now it’s too much clicking to do any real exploring. Shrug, it’s interesting and if you love twitter it’s worth at least checking out - maybe you’ll really dig it. Do you?
