Takeout dogfood

Friday, 4 December 2009

Takeout dogfood

Hi all, this is @leland, user experience lead on the @twittermobile team. I wanted to share a little bit of what we’ve been working on and thinking about.

It’s probably no secret that Twitter has an active developer community, using our APIs to create fantastically innovative apps. Nor is it a secret that Twitter and mobile phones go together like birds and flight.

What may be a less known fact is: Lots of people access Twitter on their phones via our good ol’ mobile website, and trusty ‘m’ has been delivering tweets faithfully. However, ‘m’ doesn’t fully feel like Twitter, and could probably do a bit more things for you.

‘M’ should also be fantastically innovative — naturally the best way to do that is use our own APIs. So, the mobile team here built a brand new mobile web client from scratch, using only Twitter APIs, and we’d like to share the results with you.

Our new mobile web site is previewing today, just point your phone’s browser to https://mobile.twitter.com. Its got a great new look, and has some great new touches that will make your mobile experience on Twitter a bit more fun and a lot more helpful. Let us know if you agree and especially tell us how we can make it better.

This preview works best on @Webkit browsers – Android, iPhone, Nokia S60 and Palm Web OS phones all come with these browsers installed. Other browsers like @BlackBerry work too, but we haven’t done all the fine tuning yet.

As this preview becomes ready for prime-time, we will start switching everyone who uses ‘m’ in phases to automatically receive the new mobile web client.

This is just the start, we’re excited about the new APIs launching at Twitter, and have been busy tinkering with some neat ways to use them. We look forward to sharing more cool things with you soon.