UPDATED: TwitDoc – First Impressions

UPDATE: The creators of TwitDoc (surprisingly, I must say, given the readership of this blog!) took the time to read my little review and respond to most of the problems I’ve raised here. From the outset I’d like to thank them for listening to my ramblings about the site, it’s always good to see people taking on board criticism and working on it (ahem, #fixreplies, Twitter.)

The header images have been fixed (on the main page – the actual document view has been overlooked so far, but I’m guessing that’s an accident, so a heads up here :-) ) and the menu is much easier to see. The Flash form is still there, but I’ve been told that it too might be on its way out, or at least a viable HTML alternative will be added. These are all good changes, and thank you TwitDoc for implementing them!

I uploaded a document to the service, and it is a great service. Another example of the power of Twitter apps, and the fact that 140 characters can really be stretched to contain a lot – a whole document, book or presentation in this case.

—————————————————

On the advice of @geehall1 (via his blog) , I decided to check out a new third-party Twitter service, TwitDoc.

Basically it’s a service that allows you to upload documents of various formats and share them on Twitter. In theory. But I haven’t used it yet. I didn’t get far enough without feeling compelled to write a blog post about my first impressions. So here’s a list for your viewing pleasure:

  1. The Logo – My first impressions of the page “that bird looked a bit laggy…how big’s the file? Wait. Why is it so aliased? Oh god. Please do not tell me that it’s a big image. No… Please no.”Ok that’s probably a bit overstated, but honestly, why is the bird on the page a 1058x1226px, 120kb PNG file? I know most people are using broadband these days, but it’s unnecessary, unprofessional looking and wastes peoples’ bandwidth. The same goes for the header text image, which isn’t as big, but in my opinion, never make the browser resize an image because it’ll never do a job as good as you will.
  2. The Menu – Ok, so maybe the logo and header image got a bit too much of my attention, but I almost missed the navigation menu directly under it. It’s not too bad, but a few shades darker on the colour wouldn’t hurt in my opinion.
  3. Flash – Flash is great. It’s opened up the internet to lots of different ways of creating content, animations and other things. Flash has not, and will not for the forseeable future, replace HTML. If you put a form into a web page, make it a standards compliant, non-Flash form. If you want to then add a JS based Flash replacement to the upload box, by all means go ahead, but if I happen to want to upload a file from my phone (which I can’t – hypotheticals people!) which doesn’t support Flash, I’m screwed. I’ll get the bandwidth sucking images over the 3G network, and “Alternate HTML content should be placed here.” Not very useful.

These are all, clearly, my personal opinions. From an accessibility standpoint, I think the site is a trainwreck, and until I have confidence that people can access the site I’m not really interested in storing my documents with it — or giving it my Twitter credentials.