I try not to take sides, even when it involves my friends, until I know both sides of the story clearly. Still, I don’t know Rebecca except by reputation, and I know Corinna personally, so I took her words at face value.

This morning, I got an e-mail from Rebecca, trying to clear up the situation. Without commentary on its contents, I thought I’d post it here so other people could see her side of the story.

First of all, you can read what Corinna had to say over on her blog. Then, you can read the below e-mail and see what you think.

Hi Dan,

I just wanted to clear the air about the Best of 604 Awards as I’ve seen some chatter lately on Twitter.

They have and always will be people’s choice awards. People nominate and people vote, me or judges are and never will be involved. For the 2009-2010 event I opened up a Twitter account and updated the home page http://bestof604.com.

I’m not sure why anyone would think they are “banned”, I’m not even sure in what context. I have a complete list of winners available here, listing all 1st, 2nd and 3rd place bloggers:
http://www.miss604.com/2008/12/best-of-604-winners-and-the-morning-after.html

The event hasn’t even been setup this year but I did announce nominations will once again be open March 1st. That’s about all the planning that has taken place so far.

If you have any concerns, please let me know as this is 100% about the blogs that people love and want to support — from mainstream news to knitting, it doesn’t matter.

Cheers,

Rebecca

So that’s what Rebecca had to say. I’m not going to pass any judgement in either direction yet. There’s still some details I feel like I’m missing before I make my final judgement, but hopefully this will help clear the air, and not fan the flames.

It’s hard to come up with an analogy that everyone can appreciate and which fits well enough that it will help, but I’ll try. Consider the first time you saw a TV show or movie in HD – perhaps you bought an HDTV, perhaps you upgraded from digital cable to HD, or you bought a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player. Maybe you just saw one at Best Buy playing your favourite summer blockbuster. You see what’s on the screen, and it’s still the same, really. It’s the same movie you’ve enjoyed in the past, the same TV shows you’ve always loved. The plot hasn’t changed, the writing isn’t any better. It’s quantitatively clearer, but that provides a qualitative improvement.

If you’re a gamer, the comparison is easy. Do you remember the first time you upgraded your video card to the latest and greatest? The frame rate increased, you get more texture quality, it’s smoother. There’s less jitter, scrolling and panning is smoother. You didn’t really notice it before, but now it feels better. It’s more natural, it flows better.

And that’s really the key. The iPhone isn’t faster, because ‘faster’ doesn’t connote the right differences. The iPhone is more fluid. Moving from one application to another, or from one screen to the next, or scrolling around on a website or reading your e-mail, it flows better. It’s not just that the current iPhone is slow, it’s more that it breaks your stride.

Here’s another example. Let’s say you’ve got a room in your house with doors on two sides, directly opposite. On the other two sides, you have a couch and a TV, and in the middle, there’s a coffee table. Let’s also say you have to walk through this room to get from your bedroom to the kitchen, so it’s a trip you make fairly often. If you put your coffee table directly between the two doors, then every time you cross this room, you’ll have to go around it. It’s not a big deal, but it throws off your momentum. You’ll have to step to the side twice every time you go through the room. You’ll also have to go through the line of sight from the couch to the TV, so you might have to slow down if someone’s playing games or watching a movie, waiting for the perfect opportunity, and you’re more likely to bang your knee while going around it, maybe if you’re in a hurry or it’s dark.

Using the iPhone 3G now is a lot like that. There are a lot of situations now where the flow of action from one activity to the next is disrupted. The straight path from point A to point B has a detour in the middle, an obstacle, a delay, and it slows your momentum ever so slightly. Enough of these delays and it becomes subconsciously frustrating. The iPhone 3GS does away with that.

Now here’s the key, and here’s why it’s hard to quantify. You probably didn’t notice any of those delays. You go around that coffee table so often that you don’t even realize it’s there, but on a subconscious level, it bothers you. You don’t think to move the coffee table because you don’t realize it bothers you, but if you moved it a half a foot out of the way, you’d decrease your subconscious frustration ever so slightly, and you’d find yourself enjoying your home more (and you’d have fewer bruised shins to show for it).

I didn’t dislike Twitterrific on the iPhone, not really. It was ok, but not great. The UI was nice, but I just didn’t really care for it, preferring Tweetie. I couldn’t tell you why, I just didn’t like Twitterrific’s interface, or maybe it was the colours, or maybe it was just kind of convoluted to use. I don’t know why I didn’t care for it, but I didn’t.

Now, however, I know. Twitterrific wasn’t slow, you have to understand. I wasn’t sitting there, staring at loading screens or progress bars, waiting for it to accomplish the task I’d set it to. The real reason I didn’t care for Twitterrific was because there was some subtle, imperceptible lag when moving from one action to the next. I didn’t notice it consciously, but subconsciously it bothered me, it made me dislike the app for reasons I didn’t realize or understand. On the 3GS this week, I used Twitterrific exclusively. I didn’t try any other Twitter apps, and it didn’t occur to me to want to. Twitterrific was great, and I was happy to keep using it, because that unconscious frustration with minute waits and imperceptible lag was gone.

And that’s what it feels like to move from an iPhone 3G to a 3GS. It’s a more satisfying experience, a more enjoyable device, but not for reasons that you might think. It takes better pictures, but I don’t really care. It records video, but I don’t really care. It has faster data access, but I don’t really care. It has voice control, but I don’t really care.

The real difference between the iPhone 3G and 3GS isn’t something that you’re likely to notice unless you’re looking for it. You’ll enjoy the new phone for reasons that you can’t really explain, and when people ask why you paid an extra few hundred dollars for a not-so-different phone, you won’t regret it, but you won’t be able to defend your decision either, because you can’t reduce the experience to numbers.

It just feels better.

I’m not asking too much. I mean, I don’t watch a lot of TV. Any, in fact. I don’t even own a TV. I don’t have a DVD player or TiVo, and I don’t have cable.

If you consider my impact on the television industry, you’ll find it’s not really worth factoring into any equation. And yet, if they want to reach into my pockets and clean out any part of my paycheque that doesn’t go to food, rent, or Starbucks, it’s a pretty simple matter. In fact, I’ll tell them right now what needs doing.

A tweet from the lovely Shannon McKarney got me started down this line of thought, and brought up some old ideas I’d had. Not complicated ideas, nothing I’d consider revolutionary, but pretty straightforward ideas. Her question revolved around how, given the demand indicated by the Wolverine workprint leak and the feeding frenzy of downloading it set off, can movie companies use the internet to make money? There’s a market, how do you tap it?

Simple. Give me what I want the way I want it.

Movies: easy. Release in theatres on a Friday. Next Friday, release on iTunes in HD for rent. Depending on the movie, MAYBE wait two weeks. Two weeks after that, release on Blu-Ray and DVD. Down the road, THEN you come out with extras. BD discs with behind-the-scenes stuff, all the extra fluff, bonus sequences, director’s cuts, and so on.

I want to watch movies, but that’s not what theatres are about to me. Theatres are about pushing your way through a crowd, about getting the worst seats in the house because there are no two adjacent seats together. They’re about overpriced, substandard food, five dollar soft drinks, sticky floors, and people talking to each other behind you and kicking the back of your seat.

Imagine not having to pay for that. Imagine sitting down at home, cooking up some pasta, making a sandwich, grabbing a beer, blending a smoothie, or BBQing some steaks, and then putting a movie up on the big screen. Enjoying a movie even when your baby is sick, or your child is teething. Recovering from the flu, or staying in with your sweetheart on a rainy Sunday evening. It’s a better experience all around.

Some people will prefer the classic, and for groups of any reasonable size, the theatre will just make more sense. It won’t kill the theatres, but it will augment them. More people will watch movies because the barrier to entry will be lowered. The giant screens are irreplaceable, but that just justifies them staying in business and charging more. It’s an experience, but you don’t always want it.

So what about TV shows? Possibly a little more complicated, but I have an idea about that too. First things first: confessions. I download all the TV I watch. I don’t pay for it, I don’t have cable. No one gets anything from me. If I had the following solution, I would pay.

Imagine a scenario: It’s Monday night – Lost night. You’ve got a long day at work, but at the end of it, you drive home. Throw together a dinner or some leftovers, sit down on the couch, turn on your AppleTV, and flip on Heroes. Watch it, in all its HD glory. When your wife gets home from her late-late shift, she can watch it again. The key factor: you don’t have cable. You never had. No DVR, no anything.

You bought a subscription to Heroes. You paid, up-front, for the entire season. Every Monday morning, your AppleTV downloads the next episode of Heroes for you, automatically. When you get home, you don’t have to wait for it to download, you just jump right in. The AppleTV respects airdates by requesting a key from Apple’s servers before it’s allowed to play it. It knows what time it’s supposed to be available, and once that time comes, it will let you play it. It verifies with the servers, and the content is unlocked – for good. It costs a little extra to get it in HD, but it’s worth it.

The end result? High-quality digital versions of the show, each episode sent to your home so that you can watch it on your own terms, without having to subscribe to cable TV, get the HD pack, get the HD PVR. For me, it would be about $78/mo before tax to get the same thing. That’s a lot of money that most people aren’t willing to pay – especially if, like me, you only watch a few hours of TV per week. No wonder people pirate it.

So think about that. I can pay $78 to Shaw, who then turns around and buys access to the channels, who sell access to advertisers to make money for production (or syndication rights). For that, I get hundreds of channels I’ll never watch, and years of content I have no interest in. Or, I can pay $20 (or even $30!) to subscribe to an entire season of Heroes, or any other show (adjust pricing accordingly for different types of shows).

It’s a no-brainer.

So please, accept the digital age. Accept that you can skip the middleman (or at least, a lot of the middle men). Accept that you can lower your overhead. Accept that impulse-buying is a good thing. Accept that having an entire season of Heroes paid off by the fifth episode is a good thing. Accept that you’ll be able to have TV series with long-running plots, because people will be able to easily start at the beginning, rather than wherever the networks happen to be airing them at. Accept that on-demand is better over the internet than through some broken cable box UI.

How do you stop piracy? You don’t. But if the iTunes Music Store can be more popular than free, I think you’ll find that giving people quality will encourage them to part with their hard-earned money.

Accept change, because the world is changing, with or without you. After all, I can already do everything I’ve talked about above, I’m just not paying you for the privilege.

I follow a lot of people. I’m not saying I’m following a lot of people. I follow a lot of people. How else are you going to know if they’re relevant to your interests? Interesting people follow me, and I follow back, or vice-versa. That’s how Twitter works after all, and I’m not some high-falutin’ Twitter royal who never has to follow back to be noticed and get involved with people on Twitter.

Err… not involved. Like… involved like interact. Oh nevermind.

Anyway, the inherent problem with this is that I can’t keep track of that many people, and I can’t bear to use Tweetdeck to manage people into groups (sorry, it’s just an awful, brutal client that I can’t bear to use). One day, I noticed that I wasn’t paying attention to Twitter, I was just skimming, but I was barely keeping up. I’d catch up, and then Twitterrific would refresh and I’d have another five minutes of reading to do. It had moved from a tool for communication, like IM, to a distraction, like YouTube or Wikipedia. And I wondered why. And then I figured it out.

My twitter stream was a mess. The signal to noise ratio was so low that I was getting more stuff I don’t want and less stuff I did, and as a result I was missing things. I’d see a tweet from someone in reply to someone else, follow that back to see what they were replying to, and see a tweet that was relevant to my interests that I’d just missed because of all the cruft. I’d miss people inviting me to things, I’d miss DMs or @replies. Twitter had crossed the tipping point from ‘pretty useful’ to ‘completely worthless’. There was no middle ground, it had just suddenly become something I wasn’t enjoying and couldn’t use.

So, I did what any sane person would do, and decided to solve the problem. I went through the list of people I was following and removed those who I knew I wasn’t really interested in hearing from. This included a few CBC accounts, the Associated Press, and so on. Bots were the first to go, and this made my stream more manageable, but it still wasn’t really usable, so it was time for phase two.

I had to decide what I wanted to use Twitter for. I’ve always said that it’s a service that can be something to everyone, but I had to figure out what, specifically, I wanted it to be for me, and I decided on making friends, keeping in touch with them, and learning from them. The main focus for my twitter stream was going to be social, with a secondary focus on learning and sharing knowledge.

With that in mind, now I had a goal to work towards while I trimmed. I went back to my timeline in Twitterrific and started culling. Anyone that tweeted a lot but who didn’t fall into my focus, I unfollowed. Nothing personal. Eventually, I had removed over twenty people, and I continue to trim the list every day, just as I continue to add people.

This might sound a little cold and callous. How can I unfollow my friends? How can I unfollow people I know? Well, maybe to some people it is, but to me it’s practical. If I didn’t do this, then Twitter wouldn’t be useful, I’d stop using it, and I wouldn’t have any friends on Twitter, because I wouldn’t be on Twitter.

I removed a lot of noisy celebrities. I kept iJustine because while she’s almost never relevant to my interests, she’s funny and rarely tweets. I removed Wil Wheaton, because even though he’s hilarious and his tweets are often relevant to my interests, he tweets enough that it contributes more to noise than signal, and the tweets of his that are relevant are generally more of a distraction than anything else.

I removed people I know in person, because despite them being cool people, some of them are almost entirely noise. I carefully considered the content of their tweets, and for some of them, I couldn’t remember the last time they said something interesting. Some people consisted entirely of replies to other people. Replies are fine, but in moderation. Some were always complaining about things, being negative or emo. I don’t need people feeding negativity into my life, because that doesn’t help anyone.

And so I went. I balanced my decision based on how much people were talking, how many of their tweets were relevant to my interests, and what their tweets were like. Some choices were extremely hard, but I still feel like I made the right decision. Some choices were so easy I was amazed I hadn’t done it sooner.

When I post this and people read it, they’ll likely go immediately to Twitter to see if I’m following them. If you discover I’m not, well there could be a lot of reasons. Maybe you’re really cool, but you tweet to other people a lot and it was really distracting. Maybe you tweet often, but your day-to-day interests don’t mesh with mine. Maybe you’re incredibly annoying and I just couldn’t tolerate you anymore. I’m certainly not going to air those grievances in this blog post.

If you’re wondering why I’ve unfollowed you, you will probably consider asking me. I suggest you don’t. Rather, you should look at your twitter stream and see what it is you’re saying. Ask yourself if your tweets are the image you want to project to your followers and the world. Are you being, on Twitter, the person you want to be? If the answer’s yes, then we probably just didn’t mesh well, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Not everyone is destined to be best friends.

If the answer is no, then ask yourself this: if you were me (or anyone else), would you follow you? Why not? For good reasons? For example, I wouldn’t follow me largely because I tend to talk a lot (in fits and starts), but not because, for example, I spend every tweet whining about my life. If you’re not being the person you want to be, then work on that.

Either way, don’t angst over why I unfollowed you. If you’re still following me, feel free to unfollow me. I won’t get emo about it. If you’re looking for suggestions on how to improve things, I could theoretically give that, but really, that would be like giving life advice, and I’m no counsellor.

Maybe in the future, if things change, I’ll follow you again. Maybe not. Either way, you shouldn’t really care. I’m just one guy, after all, and my opinion of you shouldn’t matter. It’s your opinion of you that does.

Incidentally, I know that I could tell Twitter not to show me @-replies to other users – but that would be silly. That’s how I found 90% of the people I’m following on Twitter right now, through other people replying to them. Joining into an interesting conversation or following along. I don’t want to lose the ‘network’ part of social networking any more than the ‘social’ part. I mean, you wouldn’t go to a party just to talk to the friends you already have, would you?

• Native Mac app
• Growl support
• Quick and easy automatic hiding/revealing on new messages or keystroke  (Twitteriffic)
• Obvious but subtle visual difference between ‘read’ and ‘unread’ messages (Twitteriffic)
• (optionally) tabbed interface, allowing the creation of groups based on various filters; Quick access to create/manage tabs from context menu (e.g. ‘Add user to tab…’
  • Explicitly create groups by specifying a set of users
  • Create ‘groups’ based on conversations – select a tweet from someone to someone, then right-click and choose ‘Create conversation group’ to create a group for messages from either person to the other. (Natsulion, kind of)
  • Create ‘groups’ based on hash tags from people you follow, to keep better track of conversations; automatically append the hashtag to your posts to the group
  • Automatically open ‘conversation’ tabs when DMs are received; if closed, it will re-open when a new DM is received; tabs are per-user (i.e. DMs from two people will show in two tabs) (Twitterfon, kind of)
• Flag specific individuals, keywords, or hashtags to be highlighted with separate colours
• Automatically collapse consecutive tweets beyond a certain threshold (to prevent one person from dominating your twitter stream); easily re-expand for reading. (Mail.app)
• Archive all tweets forever, index with Spotlight
• Assign Twitter users to Address Book entries, for better integration (Adium)
  • ‘Reply via e-mail/IM’ option in context menu
  • Replace Address Book picture with (full-size) Twitter profile image
  • Display real name from AB instead of real name or screen name from Twitter
  • Tag archived tweets with metadata to find via Spotlight
• Themeable but with a simplistic default theme, so that users can control how their tweets look and how much data is shown (Adium)
• Minimalist interface (Twitteriffic) unless themeing allows a complete UI overhaul (Bowtie)
• Drag images into the window to post to TwitPic (opens a new dialog to scale image and provide text) (TwitterFon)
• Drag URLs into the window to post in a tweet (shortening with one of the many URL-shortening services out there)
• Parse out shortened URLs, and pull metadata from known sites into a preview (YouTube clip headline/thumbnail, Flickr thumbnail, website title, etc.) (Linkinus)
• Register a URL schema (e.g. twitteriffic://) to create a bookmarklet that posts a URL via the app (most iPhone twitter apps)
• Remappable keys, including Twitteriffic defaults
• Adium/iChat/Facebook/etc. integration (update status on tweet) (Twitteriffic)
• Sync between two Macs using the same account, so that you can see all tweets you missed from wherever you last left off on your other Mac (e.g. when going from home to work)
• ‘Stash’ messages for later review (different from adding a favourite) optionally via Instapaper (Instapaper)
• Bonjour-based microblogging support (to post/receive tweets via Bonjour to people on your LAN)
• Laconi.ca (identi.ca) integration (Twhirl)
• Allow you to type past the 40-character limit, then go back and edit to fit (most well-designed Twitter clients)
• Automatic expansion of the input box to see your whole tweet while typing

I think adding these features, along with a Mac-like look-and-feel, would create the ‘ultimate’ Twitter client. So why am I listing them here, instead of saving it up and doing it myself? Partly because I’m lazy; I don’t care how I get this app, I just want to have it. If I end up having to write it myself, then that’s fine; if someone writes it for me, I’ll pay for it.

What do you think? What must-have Twitter client features can you not live without? Which of my features are garbage and have no place in a Twitter client?