Dabr: making Twitter accessible

Twitter

In case you don’t already know, Twitter is a service which lets you send short messages or “tweets” to whoever chooses to read them. You decide who you want to “follow”, i.e. whose messages you want to see.

It’s described (mostly by Twitter) as “microblogging”, since the tweets do behave a bit like a blog, in that once posted they remain there for anyone to come along and see, but really it’s nothing like a blog: it’s experienced more like a cross between a speeded-up newsgroup and a slowed-down chatroom, but one where you get to choose who’s in it. (Though depending on the settings you’ve chosen, you may also see one-sided conversations between people who are in the room and ones outside who you can’t see.)

An important feature of Twitter (which the media so far don’t seem to have picked up on) is that there are many ways to access it. The official website, http://twitter.com, is one, but there are also a number of phone and computer applications able to send and receive tweets and to view them in various ways. In some countries you can “tweet” by SMS. There are websites too (both desktop and mobile). They’ve sprung up partly because of certain deficiencies in the site, and partly because of the wide variety of ways in which people use Twitter. For example, you might have several groups of people: core ones you want to keep up to date with all the time, others whose tweets you find interesting but don’t mind missing things, and several extremely talkative (“tweetative”?) ones who are best read individually rather than mixed in with everyone else. The website won’t let you set up such groups, but there are third-party applications which will. (So far I’ve not used one which does that, but I could do with one since I now follow too many people to keep up easily with them all.)

Twitter also lets you send direct messages, which go privately into someone’s inbox, and mark tweets as favourites so they appear in a special folder for future reference.

The day Twitter stopped working

Unfortunately, one thing Twitter seems prone to is the introduction of changes without any visible consultation with users (none has been visible to me, anyway), and these can sometimes be far-reaching. In my recent post grumbling about websites “improving for the worse”, I mentioned waking up one day to find that Twitter no longer worked in Opera Mini, which had been my main access to it. The changes were drastic, and included these:

• The button for sending a tweet no longer worked, so I could no longer post (though I eventually discovered a backdoor way to tweet).
• I could no longer send direct messages.
• I could no longer mark a tweet as a “favourite”.

So, basically, Twitter was now just a service for letting me see what other people were saying, not for actually communicating with anyone. I’d been reduced to the status of an observer.

Twitter does have a mobile site, but its functionality is very limited: for example, one can’t even view direct messages, let alone send them.

I reported the problem six months ago at GetSatisfaction, and did receive a reply from someone at Twitter saying they’d filed a bug and would fix it as soon as possible, but at the time of writing, there has been no change.

Dabr

So, in order to remain a Twitter user, and stay in touch with my friends, I had to rapidly investigate other ways of accessing Twitter. The two or three Java apps which I tried were truly horrible and I won’t mention their names. There was a website which went some of the way towards what I needed, but still had important things missing (and also had a colour scheme apparently designed to lead the eye away from the text of any tweets, making it quite annoying to read). I was tweeting about this when the following tweet appeared on my Replies page, from someone called @Dabr:

@timtfj You want favourites available from a mobile Twitter site? Dabr doesn’t do that yet, but it could.

The tweet was from David Carrington, the developer of Dabr, which is a website at http://dabr.co.uk/. He had created the site for his own use, because the Twitter sites that were already available didn’t meet his needs. I replied along the lines that yes, I did want that, and went off to look at the site.

At that point, it was quite rudimentary; it was however operational enough to be usable and useful. Very soon afterwards—it may have been an hour or so, but I don’t remember—favourites appeared as a menu option.

Since then, many features have been added and I now prefer dabr.co.uk to twitter.com even when I’m on a PC rather than a mobile phone.

Dabr as I typically view it. Text size is set to
smallest and the window is resizeable.
Tweets are copyright
of the tweeters.

I think the key is the way in which it was developed. What I described above is typical of the way David interacts with Dabr users. The web application is open-source; every feature has been added in close consultation with users; most, I think, have been added as the result of someone saying “I really wish it could . . .” or of somebody’s annoyance with the way one of the other apps does things. The users, after all, are the ones who know what they want to be able to do.

I don’t want to say too much about David’s excellent customer service, in case it results in his receiving a deluge of tweets to deal with, so I’ll just say that it involves the same level of interaction as the development of the site has done.

If you do have a look at http://dabr.co.uk/ and think it looks rather basic, don’t be deceived: there’s plenty of functionality there, but unlike many other websites and applications the functions aren’t accompanied by lots of unnecessary screen clutter. It’s designed to work well and display on small screens, not to look flashy. Once you start clicking things you’ll find out . . .

Here, for Twitter users, is a list of some of the things Dabr does which twitter.com currently does not:

• Picture previews: if a tweet contains a twitpic.com or flickr.com URL, a preview of the picture is displayed in the tweet.
• Picture uploads: pictures can be sent to twitpic.com direct from Dabr. (NB: this currently causes a bug in Opera Mini 4.2.)
• Correct display of @replies: “In reply to” is only displayed for tweets which reply to a specific tweet, not merely ones with “@yourname” at the beginning, so following the link always takes you to the correct tweet.
• Highlighting of replies: Replies to you, and tweets mentioning your name, are displayed against a darker background. (Though for some reason the highloghting colours seem to work better on my phone than my PC.)
• Retweets: clicking the quotes icon next to a tweet copies it into a new one, with “RT @username” at the start. This is essential on phones like mine which can’t copy-and-paste.
• Hashtags: Dabr recognises these, and clicking one takes you to the search results for that tag. If you tweet from that page you remain there, creating a “conference view” for people who are attending an event and posting tweets labelled with a particular tag.
• Accessibility: It works in Opera Mini.

So it seems to me we have two opposite models of what these days is called “user experience”: one is to decide what users want, and give it to them without prior warning, with very little interaction; the other is to listen to users at every stage and involve them in the actual process of developing the site. I know which I prefer as a user.