Why Twittervision Doesn’t Work…
February 26th, 2008 | by Brad King |I spent a lot of time extolling the virtues of true interactivity, but it’s still a work in progress.
I start my Journalism 2010 presentation with a look at the difference between what traditional media thinks is interactivity and what the digerati thinks is interactivity. The point is to demonstrate that the second offer real-time, dynamic interfaces put together by people, while the first is still a top-down way to deliver the same information.
The reality is that both have removed control from the user. And that makes one no different than the other in terms of its usefulness.
It’s difficult for the digerati not to jump on the bandwagon whenever some hacke throws together a mashup that uses APIs to create something new. The fact is, though, Twittervision and Twittervision 3D do little but allow us to watch — with no interaction — events as they unfold in the Twitterverse.
If the scroll is too fast…or you want to go back…I haven’t found an intuitive way to do that. (Possibly there is a way — my point is that you have programmers working on applications with no sense of the user.) And my hometown newspaper’s Data Map does the same type of thing. You can map the information that they let you.
True interactivity means allowing users to construct data in the ways that they want to. With limited restrictions. As limited as possible.
The reality is the technologically savvy — and that number is growing — migrate towards places where information is easily manipulatable. If you construct you data in a way that limits access to it, particularly in terms of how it’s displayed, you will quickly become obsolete.
