CSSquirrel

This will be the last post involving Twitter for a while, I swear. Unfortunately discussions about the service have dominated the various watering holes of web development for the past few days, so this is the only way I can get the topic to drain out of my head.

This one isn’t a deep commentary on corporate hypocrisy or a glam shot of Andy Clarke in his knickers, sorry.

Ultimately, I like the Twitter service. Although I don’t know if it’s best described as “micro-blogging”, “shopping list”, or “mutual voyeurism”, it’s an interesting service that lets you update details of your life or clever thoughts with a minimum of time investment. The 140 character limit helps provide limitations for people (like myself) who’d rather blather on about an inane topic for paragraphs.

I wonder if we could get politicans to do their talking in this fashion? It’d save us a lot of time.

The main problem with the service, which Twitter has become infamous for, is the tendancy of their whole server to buckle on a daily basis. I’ve come to expect it to be in an afternoon state of shock when I get back to the studio after lunch. It’s so predictable, it’s sad. I can’t help but wonder at this point what desperate straights they must be going through to reverse this trend… and this week’s comic is my theory on that topic.

And now, back to the rest of the world of web development.

I’m not going to write a massive post on the topic, as much more eloquent people than I already have. However, I’ll explain the essence of it. Twitter user Arial Waldman described recently in her blog the harassment she’s received via that service. Harassment that violates Twitter’s Terms of Service, mind you. Yet when she continued to file reports to the company about her harassment, eventually finally talking to the CEO himself, Twitter did the opposite of what one would expect. They refused to ban the user, and instead are merely changing their TOS.

Twitter is a fun, useful service. But if it allows itself to become a place where harassment (pretty lewd stuff, at that) is allowed, then I can’t imagine it’ll stay in use forever. Wake up, guys, you need to protect your users.

[Edit: Two new things I've learned since this entry went up. First, Arial is part of the Pownce team. While I won't say outright that working for the competition could have been a factor, it does bring the validity of the situation into question. Secondly, as Twitter team members stated, both sides of the story hadn't been told and they offer their viewpoint of the situation here. I don't know what to make of the situation, but it's clear that if harassment is happening that Twitter needs to follow up on their threats and ban such people.]

As cool as I’m sure it is to get the thrill of having strangers finding you important/interesting enough to follow on Twitter, I think people need to start paying attention more and blocking stalker-bots and other bloat-causing monstrosities.

Let’s be honest here: Twitter isn’t the fittest boat in the ocean right now, with a tremendous number of crashes and slowdowns this week alone. What isn’t helping are twitter accounts following several thousand strangers at once. I myself just decided to block a new follower who was following over twenty-four thousand people!

Twenty-four thousand. That’s like me trying to keep track of what a third of my city is doing all at once. That’s just messed up. Seriously, even if that account is ran by a human and not a machine, he’s clearly not actually paying his attention to the feed.

So do some Twitter activism. Block stalker-bots (or stalker people) from your Twitter account. That’ll be one less tweet notification that their overworked server will have to deal with.

How does someone following 2,000+ people on Twitter ever see a large enough percentage of any one person’s tweets for the information to be relevant or comprehensible? Even if you have the patience to dig through all of the past tweets you’ve missed since you last checked, the signal to noise ratio must be horrible.

Is there some sort of horrible “I’m following the most people” stalker contest I don’t know about?

This makes me wonder, at what number of follows does Twitter move from a relatively containable “keeping track of friends/colleagues/big shots” experience to a “glancing into people’s windows at night while driving at 60mph” event? I think I understand the voyeuristic draw involved, but getting a different sentence from thirty different people in less than a minute is something like trying to read falling scraps of paper in the aftermath of a library explosion. Any meaning derived from stitching them together is self delusion at best.

It only took me about four and a half months from the moment the idea was conceived, but finally the first CSSquirrel comic has been produced.

Initially my inaugural venture into the world of a web design webcomic was going to provide a gentle mockery of Opera’s failure thus far to produce a developer add-on in the vein of Firebug. Then, of course, they dropped the Dragonfly bomb. Robbed of my thunder, I’ve moved to something both more ridiculous and risque.

Which is to say, Andy Clarke’s underpants.

Well, it’s not precisely about underpants. I’ve recently fallen to the web developer trap that is Twitter, and like some voyeur into the world of the notable I’ve started following the twits (tweets?) of luminaries such as Clarke, Zeldman, and David Shea, among others. Buying into the premise of Twitter as a micro-blogging tool, I’d hoped to see the insights their bright minds would produce about this whole web design thingy.

I’ve definitely seen some insights, but at 140 characters or less, it seems Twitter is more adept at detailing what someone’s had for lunch, absurd overheard remarks, or links to Flickr photos. (Incidentally,  the whole blending of Twitter and Flickr and other such apps ties nicely into Zeldman’s topic of the vanishing personal site that I’ve been meaning to weigh into. File that under ‘Topic for Later’.)

So I’ve felt less like an enthusiastic pupil and more like a peeping Tom. Has this stopped me?

… No. No it hasn’t.

What I didn’t expect to see, and am fascinated by, is the sort of weaving tales that a group of Twitter feeds create when a bunch of users are discussing the same topic or are at the same convention. In particular, An Event Apart New Orleans 2008 was an event that I didn’t have the pleasure to go to, but did have the pleasure to experience indirectly through the various tweets of the designers present. It was even more enhanced by the various Flickr photostreams linked to by the participants, showing smiling pictures of famous designers, hazy pictures of jazz bars, or neon-lit photos of rainy Bourbon Street.

For a guy who was struggling with misbehaving forms on a chilly spring workday, it was a delightful diversion to refresh my follows every now and then via Twitteroo and see what was going on.

What was forming were stories. One that caught me the most was what I’ve dubbed the “Ballad of Andy’s Bag”, a gripping tale that starts here with his touchdown in New Orleans, and then shows the breakdown of a man’s mind as he’s robbed of his luggage for almost two days before being finally reunited here.

I decided this little tale could use some immortalization, and perhaps a disturbing implication of stalking, thus I’ve formed the monster that is this comic. I’m not sure if it was entirely wise for me to launch things off with a sketch of web design’s British folk hero in his knickers, but sometimes these things just write themselves.

Although it’s my intent to continue to provide comic forays into the web design world (probably on a weekly basis), it’s not my plan to show mostly nude designers regularly (I don’t think the world is ready for Jeffrey Zeldman displayed as such).

Please feel free to enjoy