The Importance of Words in Web Navigation
Open API’s ROCK
I’ve written a few posts about Twitter already, fascinated with the simplicity of their pure concept. What a wonderful service, open to new ideas by exposing their API. In my eyes this is very forward looking because the Twitter team is expecting to see not just one community build up around the core service, but many communities. Twitter micro-crowds if you will, where all participants are engaged with the core service and valuable mash-ups. Already there are Twitter geo-location visualizers & user search (which exposes user post time-lines), continuously evolving Twitter books (140 characters at a time), Twitter stand up-comedians etc,. Every micro-crowd is using Twitter in different ways that meet the personal needs of each micro-crowd member.
Growing Pains
The use of Twitter and twitter-like functionality is expanding quickly, so I believe that the Twitter team is receiving a tremendous cacophony of Tweets about ways in which to improve the service. Instead of adding to the noise, I thought I’d add my $0.02 by pointing to a navigation issue that the Twitter team will probably fix shortly. In fact they are probably already planning to make the change, so perhaps I’m being a bit previous.
Why Word Usage Matters
Note the way that I used the last word in that last paragraph above, as “previous” can be defined as “too soon or too hasty”. While I am not an English Major, I was confused about how the Twitter.com service uses “previous” and “next” in navigation on the site. Today when I want to see Tweets that have been posted within the past, I scroll to the bottom of the “now” page, click “Next”, and I land on the page that represents data from my most recent past (page=2) in my “friends” time-line of posts. When I scroll to the bottom of this page I see “previous | next.”
I’m confused by what “previous” and “next” might mean in this context, because where Temporal considerations exist for me as a user I need additional clues in order to know what to do immediately. If I want to see older posts I know that I can probably click “next” and get to older posts, however I need to interpret this. I might also think that “next” will take me back to the next post in Time, the one that was most recently posted on the “now” page.
Words for Temporal Application
Previous and Next are usually a series of predefined linear steps where Time is not involved. Where Time is an important aspect of the user experience we need to add Temporal indicators into our navigation language.
For example, where data is representing “now” or “now-minus-a-few-minutes-hours”, textual navigation might work like this:
“Now and Recent || Older”
or just “Older” because we are probably already viewing data from “now”
And for data representing recent past, textual navigation might work like this:
“Now and Recent || Newer || Older”
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We almost need to invent a new word that means the time-span of “Now and Recent” in order to take into consideration all of the web services which involve a temporal flow of information. Users constantly try to stay abreast of information within a confined but loosely defined time-space prior to moving the information to “archive”, “delete” or “out-of-immediate-awareness” (like the messages that are deep in the past of your recorded chat-stream).
Let’s call it the “now-span” unless someone has a better idea.
It’s fun to make up words 
“X” = ” Now-span ”
Definition: The time-span of “Now including Recent”. “Within a limited recent history, including the present.”
“Y” = ” Now-spanning ”
Definition: To pay attention to geo-temporal events within (X). (i.e. To read a chat post sent to me in San Francisco from Stephanie in New York at 9:16 PST, while simultaneously performing other interactive tasks that are also geo-temporally tagged. Some tasks are completed immediately, others sit for awhile before being addressed)
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