Rixstep
 About | ACP | Buy | Industry Watch | Learning Curve | News | Products | Search | Substack
Home » Industry Watch » The Technological

The New Improved Twitter DM Menu!

Great strides from great engineers.


Get It

Try It

TWITTERLAND (Rixstep) — Those hard working Ruby engineers at Twitter don't let the grass grow between their toes. They're always thinking of fabulous new features to make their site experience better than ever.

Latest is the new menu for managing DMs (direct messages aka private messages).

(It's a bit misleading to call them 'private', as Twitter never remove them (even if you think they do) and they do have a curious propensity of popping up, even in public timelines, when least expected. But whatever.)

DMs have had a special place in the Hall of Fame of Twitter software engineering. For the longest time it wasn't possible to pass links through direct messages; then one fine Frisco day the Twitter engineers woke (slowly) and wondered 'why did we ever block links?' And so they weren't blocked anymore.

And of course behaviour on the ordinary web interface and the mobile interface were totally different. Even counting characters (to 140) was different. Far be it from the Ruby rubies to use the same code more than once!

And deleting direct messages was a pain - a royal pain. Unless you hired on a third party app to do it for you. And then you ran into another block by the Ruby rubies - too many messages deleted too fast! Oh it was fun, it was wonderful.

And then suddenly - as the more sophisticated at Twitter describe it: VIOLA - there was a MENU. A Twitter Direct Message menu. And it had but one menu item.

Delete

Most Twitter users were able to figure out what was going on. And happiness levels increased dramatically in Twitterland.

One More Thing

And then one of the Ruby rubies looked at the paltry DM menu a few weeks later and said in a low whisper:

That menu looks paltry!

And so they set about, that talented IT crew that never sleep, trying to find things they could add to the paltry DM menu. This is what they came up with.



And Twitter users everywhere were happy because they knew the new menu meant the Ruby rubies were back up to their old tricks again!

1. Turn off notifications

Turn off notifications? Turn off what notifications? Oh who cares! It makes the menu look better!

2. Delete

Delete - and no more. This is why we have the menu. This is all people want.

3. Flag as spam

Flag as spam? You mean you started following someone who's a spammer? What you want to do is flag the user, not a message.

4. Mark as abusive

Mark a DM as abusive? Again: you started following someone who turns out to be abusive? Just fucking block them FFS!

Many More Things

Sooner or later the Twitter twits will get bored again. Yes there are lots of bugs they could fix. But that's too difficult! So let's add gobs of new features to the DM menu instead!

5. Facebook login

This is important and must be an oversight on the part of the Ruby rubies. Of course you want a login function inside the Twitter DM interface. It can't be that hard to add!

6. Choose theme

It's rather common that Twitter users are deep in the DM menu and suddenly think they want to change their account theme - a pre-made theme or a custom theme, set the background position, the background colour, the theme colour, etc. Do it!

7. Password

There is no better place to reset your Twitter password than in your DM interface.

Fail Whale Rules!

The 'Fail Whale' may be gone (mostly) but its spirit lives on.

See Also
Twitter: Compounding Stupidity
Clever Twitter
#NewTwitter
'Twitter : <%= reason.capitalize %>'
Another #EpicFail for Twitter UI Code
Link Shortener Exploit Cripples Twitter
Those Math Geniuses at Twitter
Twitter Twits Discover ROT-13
Happy Twitter Holidays

About | ACP | Buy | Industry Watch | Learning Curve | News | Products | Search | Substack
Copyright © Rixstep. All rights reserved.