organize | Bradley Robb

From nearly the moment that Twitter released it’s open API, the website became a poor and secondary means to interact with the service. By allowing others to make use of the service as they saw fit, Twitter grew in ways and directions that founders Ev and Biz say they never saw coming. The opposite side of that equation meant that the Twitter website went from being an merely adequate means of use to sub par. The road back to relevancy has been a bumpy one, with changes often rolling out in waves – and in the case of the current search-integrated sidebar, those waves could sometimes takes months to make their way around.

Around the time that a hundred followers became a big deal, the Twitter Following and Follower pages became almost grossly inadequate. As the pages are organize in reverse chronological order, that is your newest follower or account that you’re following appearing on top, navigating these pages meant either having to guess when you first encountered a specific account or flip through each page manually and scan icons. Such a process was arduous, to put it bluntly, when trying to send a direct message to infrequent users with obscure user names.

Now, for the first time since I can remember (and I’ve been on Twitter for nearly two and a half years now), Twitter has updated their Following/Followers pages. The new pages, seen below, allow users to have expanded follower lists, displaying each user’s last tweet, or in list form for quick scans. Both views have a button which expands into a menu featuring some convenient tasks – Reply (or ‘mention’ in the new Twitter parlance), Direct Message, Unfollow, and the ever-important Block function.

The Expanded Following View

The expanding menu is helpful in all but one regard – it drastically slows down the ability to prune your following list. Until this week, users could skim their Following pages and determine who was following back simply by looking for the option to message. No message option meant that the user was not following you back. True, users can now click one-by-one on each flyout menu to see if they are able to direct message, but the quick Monday morning parity sessions are likely a thing of the past. It would be nice to see the green Following Checks from the Followers pages make their way onto the Following pages. I guess in the mean time, users will have to rely on the various third party follower monitoring services for this.

The Followers List View

All in all, the new changes add some much needed functionality, but still fall short of where they need to be. With the ease in which Twitter users can find and follow, Twitter really does need an inter-account search function, so that users don’t have to flip through page after page of followers, even in the nice, new, compact List format.

Sometimes a problem or project just seems too large to delve into. Concepts are too obtuse. Situations simply too large. Gravity, or the need for gravity, keeps some ideas flat on the ground while the others hover ahead, just out of reach. No matter how wide your arms are, there’s no getting them around the situation.

This was certainly a problem I found myself in when I returned from the war. It was a situation so large, so otherworldly that I could not find a place to sink my fingers in, to start to rip the skin off in order to get to the meat. That I had spent the majority of my time over there writing emails, short stories, and a modern lit novel was cause for great dismay with my literature professor from the Academy. I told him the war was too big for me.

The same problem was plaguing me when I recently sat down to start working on a novel. I had issues that I wanted to deal with, and characters that I wanted to have show them, and a desire for complexity both in the portrayal of society but also in the plot structure. The entire situation screamed out that it was big. Real big. As in “damn, where do I start?” big.

In the years since the war, I’ve grown to love the outline. I’ve learned to love multiple drafts. I’ve learned to love the phrase, “I’ll fix it in post.” I have acclimatized to a non-linear work process.

And I’ve got a ton of index cards.

Not my actual bulletin board

The start of my story was that first index card. I forced that finger hold by writing down the very first thing I knew about my story. I then wrote one or two clarifying notes about that first though. I grabbed another index card, and repeated. Before I knew it, I was tacking up a rather detailed organizational structure onto my bulletin board.

After a single night, a significant amount of whiskey, and dozens of index cards, I suddenly had the playground on which on my novels would unfold.

The lesson? Sometimes, you just need to find “a” starting point rather than “the” starting point. After all, you can always fix it in post.

Bradley Robb

I'm Here Purely To Amuse Myself

Tag Archives: organize

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