The “New Twitter” has been tweeted, blogged, mashed, etc. into oblivion the past month. I’ve been able to use it for about a month and I really do enjoy some the features of the new interface. However, they still have not fixed one glaring problem I’ve had with their web interface – when you’re on someone’s profile page and then log-in using the drop down interface, it takes you to your page, not back to the page you were on.
Now, I understand that they created the “new twitter” interface to bring to the web a lot of the features currently available in most third party clients. But they must realize that for most prolific tweeters, the web interface doesn’t meet a lot of their needs.
I tried to not use a third-party client at the recent High Ed Web conference in Cincinnati. This did not go well. Even though I had access to and used the “new twitter” web interface, I had problems keeping up. Why? Because it doesn’t allow for changes in the way I like to see things. Using a column based client like Tweetdeck, I could keep track of the conference hashtag (#heweb) as well as read tweets from others that weren’t at the conference. Had I not been using Tweetdeck, I would never have known there was a 4.7 earthquake back home in Oklahoma while I was away. I wouldn’t have seen those tweets till much later.
But back to point at hand. One of the primary ways I use twitter at work (8+ hours a day) is to follow tweets on Tweetdeck and if I see someone mention a person that I might be interested in following, I click the username and it opens their profile page in Chrome. Since I’m not usually logged in to the Twitter web interface, in order to follow said person, I must log in via the drop down and then either retype that persons twitter name into the search or address field or hit back to actually get to where I can follow them.
“But you can view their profile in Tweetdeck.” Yes, that is true. But as Tweetdeck is quick to point out, that requires using more of my precious API calls. And to be honest, the Tweetdeck interface for a user’s profile isn’t stellar.
My main issue with this problem is the fact that Twitter is going against normal UI protocol. When you offer an on-page drop down login interface, the user expects to stay on that page once they’ve logged in. If you want to force me to my profile page after logging in, then take me to a new page to log in rather than offering an in-page element.
Sorry this was rather long, but it’s an issue that I’ve had and have noticed that several others have had as well.
So please Twitter, Ev, someone fix this!
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