Today, FastCo Design released this year’s best in ux design, which features 14 wonderful websites and devices with beautiful interfaces. (If you have any interest in design, FastCo Design is great! It’s an online publication from Fast Company magazine.) One of the featured websites is Shuu.sh, which allows you to micro-size those pesky Twitter stream hogs.
Shuu.sh, while not the most polished of applications, shows your Twitter stream in a whole new light. Well, a whole new size.
A Twitter steam can feel like everyone’s shouting at you at once. You have to digest so much information at once. Even with my 250-odd followers, I have a hell of a time keeping up with it. Belinda Lanks said it best in the FastCo Design post: “[a] Twitter feed can feel like a student seminar, in which the overeager students lap up all the discussion time, drowning out the less frequent (but no less considered) remarks of the diffident participants.”
The guys at BERG—inventors of Little Printer (post coming soon)—came up with a system of displaying tweets so that users who frequently tweet are shown in a smaller font and infrequent in a larger font. It probably comes from the idea that people who talk less say more important things frequently. :)
Each user is assigned a “frequency level” of 1 to 11, with 1 being the most infrequent. Font sizes are adjusted according to that scale. According to the site: “[t]he level is calculated as a function of how many tweets per day the user has averaged since joining.”
Many of the Twitter accounts I follow are more newsy (@aldotcom, @breakingnews, @youranonnews), so their frequent posting is wanted. It would be wonderful to be able to filter my timeline within Shuu.sh by list (as I have two private lists: “Interesting Folks” and “News”), I could then close the list within TweetDeck and have Shuu.sh along side it.
This application has an incredibly amount of potential and I applaud BERG for their ingeniousness. I’d also really like to see a more social aspect integrated into the algorithm of frequency level calculation. But I’m sure many features are in the works for this!
My frequency level is 4. What’s your’s?
Logan
