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A Blog about Social Web Design

A Blog about Social Web Design

The Curious Case of Twply and TwitterToday

Late last week a service called Twply tricked over eight hundred Twitter users to give over their sign-up credentials using deceitful design. I’ve annotated their sign-up screen to show how they did it.

The Twply story is a lesson in many ways (see the discussion about the password anti-pattern here, here, and here), but I going to focus on the interface of the service in particular.

First off, here is how the ruse worked. Twply claimed to send @replies to your inbox, a valuable service that Twitter doesn’t currently provide (Twitter does give you the option of sending direct messages) When you signed up for Twply, you enter your Twitter username and password to give them access to your account. You also had the option to “support” Twply on your first login (an option which was on by default). Many people did this. However, after they signed up, many noticed that Twply had posted to their account on their behalf (that’s what “support” meant). The message read:

“Just started using http://twply.com/ to get my @replies via email. Neat stuff!”

So followers of the person, upon seeing the tweet, would then go see what Twply was about, and the process would repeat itse

7 ways designing in public can improve your businessYesterday

In response to yesterday’s post, Garrett Dimon, creator of the bug and issue tracker Sifter, shot me an email explaining his reasons for designing in public. Garrett built Sifter basically in the public eye, from the initial ideas all the way through production. (here is an example: Smart Return in Sifter)

This is exactly the type of thing I was asking for more of in my post yesterday, and I feel like an idiot for not including Garrett’s work initially, since I’ve been a long-time fan of his work. Anyway, Garrett recommends this process of transparency for everyone, and listed out 7 reasons for thinking so. I’ve formatted his email into a blog post below (with his permission). Thanks, Garrett!

—— Garrett’s email follows ——

Just wanted to drop you a line about your latest post to provide a bit more evidence about the effectiveness of sharing design decisions. I’ve been doing essentially the same thing for Sifter, my little bug a

Why I like 37signals Design Decision PostsJanuary 7

I really like the design decisions blog posts at 37signals. A recent example: Design Decisions: Saying more in less space on the new Highrise site, in which a designer (in this case Jason) discusses how he made changes to a certain design. He shows the initial design, lays out the rationale for change, and then shows the changes. The structure of the post couldn’t be more simple.

But the reason why I like the posts isn’t because of the content (although it’s good). I really like the posts because they do it and nobody else does.

Now think about this. 37signals is a well-known company in web design circles and have a solid reputation as designers, and they’re releasing a beta design on their site, talking about its shortcomings on their blog. They’re designing in public. They have no need to do this. They’re risking their reputation here. Can you imagine if their design is less than perfect? Imagine what people will say? Holy cannoli…people might actually find something not-so-good about

Thoughts on the Friendfeed interfaceJanuary 6

Some modest suggestions for improving the Friendfeed interface

Friendfeed is getting a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about what they should do with their service. I’m sure I don’t know the bigger issues that Friendfeed are dealing with, but I do have some observations about the interface, which I’ve summarized below.

But first, a little rationale about how I got to these suggestions. We must start with the simple question: What is the core mechanic of Friendfeed? What is the one thing that Friendfeed does that makes it a valuable service? I would argue that it’s reading the feeds of friends in order to discover valuable content.

The first thing you’ll notice when you set up an account, however, is that Friendfeed is a fire-hose of content. Like other streams, it produces way too much content to keep track of comprehensively. To that end, one of Friendfeed’s primary goals has to be the efficient management of the fire-hose. The service can do this in two ways: by providing powerful search and filtering features to reduce/organize the content one sees or by making the interaction with each piece of content more efficient.

Friendfeed seems to have a good handle on the first way, providing powerful search features and filters in the form of lists, rooms, ways to hide content, etc. I’m sure there are other good ways to push forward h

What Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers can teach us about interface designJanuary 5

I recently finished Outliers: The Story of Success, the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell. More than any other writer, Gladwell can take any topic, even the most dry and boring, and turn it into compelling reading. Each time I receive a New Yorker magazine and see Gladwell’s byline inside, I immediately read whatever he wrote and end up enjoying it.

The entire Outliers book is good, but Chapter 7: The Ethnic History of Plane Crashes, is amazing. It’s worth the price of the book just to see how Gladwell stitches this chapter together. In it Gladwell tells the story of several plane crashes and uses the last radio co