Correct me if I am wrong - but this thing being branded as "Twitter Lite" and marketed on lite.twitter.com is actually just the mobile web app, available at mobile.twitter.com ... right?
Seems to be the case. I use the mobile twitter web app because it crashes less than the native app on my older phone. It does seem noticeably faster now.
This seems like a weird branding/marketing push for what is essentially "we did a performance pass on our mobile website"
This is really nice, even on desktop. And fast. Love it.
Looking at them side by side you really get a sense of how much 'stuff' Twitter Heavy has compared to Twitter Lite.
It would be so good if they could apply a bit of this stripped down approach to the main site and really work on list/follow management features.
I'd really love to get more out of Twitter as there are a lot of great people on there but (unless I'm missing something obvious) there doesn't really seems to be many tools built in to help you do that.
I love this. I was always frustrated by the ever-growing-in-size Twitter app. Which is around 105 Megabytes now (aka ~73 1.44 floppies). So I welcome this.
> Today, we are rolling out Twitter Lite, a new mobile web experience which minimizes data usage, loads quickly on slower connections, is resilient on unreliable mobile networks, and takes up less than 1MB on your device.
1 MB is “acceptable” by today’s standards, but when you think about it — 1 MB to display a few 140-character tweets?
It's because Twitter (the company) has no idea what to do with Twitter (the product), and are trying to branch out in increasingly dubious ways.
For comparison, Tweetbot is 7.6MB and Twitterific is 10.3MB (both on iOS), and they provide a much nicer experience for using Twitter than the official app.
Not only it's big, but it's a bandwidth hog as well... It's the most hungry app on my phone and I do a lot of web browsing on it. Twitter should not out-consume the web.
This is much better then the bloated main UI. But I'd wish an option for an even lighter HN like interface. It still doesn't look to good in a text browser like elinks. One or 2 lines per tweet max would be ideal. That and a rss/atom feed that can be fed into the matrix network and clients.
Originally it was a listing of 140c messages, ideal to quickly view the status of your friends to enhance social proprioception. Since then it unfortunately morphed into a bloated, marketing oriented and visual distraction party where it mostly serves the look at me and commercial agendas. Authenticity, tele-awareness, social proprioception and efficienty flew away with the original twitter bird. Did he have a name? Is he coming back one day?
It might only be alpha phase, but why not give it a shot? I'm not the developer for that, but am a happy user of the matrix protocol. Also, there are plenty of users leveraging matrix with several other bridges as well such as irc, slack, gitter, etc.
I don't deal with spam much, I notice the occasional fav or retweet from obviously fake accounts, sometimes I get a mention too. But all of these happen once per month maybe and I do my job in blocking and reporting every account I notice. Once per month is a pretty low rate, I get more spam than that in my email Inbox.
I also have direct messages from everybody active. Since enabling it I haven't received any spam. Maybe I've been lucky :)
And I don't have an obscure account (https://twitter.com/alexelcu). Maybe more popular accounts see more spam, I don't know.
A couple other things I've noticed having to do with "promoted content":
1. uBlock origin seems to block ads in the normal web client, but not in the mobile web client (in desktop FireFox as well as mobile FireFox).
2. Mobile twitter client lacks the drop-down menu where you used to be able to choose "I don't like this ad".
Now that I look at it, though, that menu on the main twitter web app doesn't have that option any more, either. You can "report this ad", which isn't quite the same.
To get to the same menu in the mobile web app, you need to tap/click the add tweet, then choose the more options icon.
The normal twitter web app has now added a "dismiss" option on mouseover.
FFS, there's no consistency of interface across the three at all!
From what I understand, the twitter mobile web client uses react and from a quick look at the source, they're using css modules which means the class names are generated at build time.
Considering that most ad blockers work by identifying ads through class names, it would explain why uBlock origin wouldn't work on the mobile site.
It's great to have a less bloated site, but it still uses the same UI which is only viable for the most basic usage. The thing I want improved the most is list viewing and management. Right now the only good way to view lists is tweetdeck which only really works on desktop.
This is going to sound negative, even though I'm glad this is here:
How did we arrive at a time where it is news-worthy to launch a non-bloated service client?
Or to phrase it differently: What is the claimed consumer gain of a bloated client?
More like this please. It feels like going back in time when I first tried a 100Mbps connection in the late 90s and all the web content was made to accomodate DSL and modems.
I support your idea that software is often bloated.
However, as usual you're doing the mistake of somehow thinking that you are a customer of Twitter's. Of course you're not, since you're not paying to use the service.
That turns things around so that you're the usual ad target product, meaning the app might swell to contain more candy to tease you into clicking, and so on.
Uh, and just to be clear I'm not meaning "you" in a very personal sense, this applies to me too when I use Twitter, of course. :)
Well they can release something good after all. Look at the main Web UI. I don't know what they are thinking at Twitter. Its the most unintuitive UX I've ever seen.
E.g. :
Click on the Image -> Only the Image gets larger
Click on the frame around the image -> See the comments and Image is larger.
This lets me do side-by-side full screen on a mac, which the full website can't do (not responsive so I can't make it narrow enough) and the mac app won't. The previous mobile site was nearly good enough, but required refreshing for new tweets. Very happy that this is available.
What exactly is the issue with allowing javascript. The entire internet runs on it. I keep seeing this comment on various other posts. Javascript is here to stay, and for you to get the best experience, or at all, you're going to need it.
I'm one feature away from making this my main twitter client on my phone: when I save a web app made to run by itself as an alternative or replacement for a native app to my home page, opening it should by default hide the trappings of the web browser.
The constant pop-in/pop-out of the header and footer makes tapping on things just obnoxious enough to make me not want to use it. I know some web apps have removed them, I just don't know why it isn't more common.
Also, it has that little bar at the top to open the site with the app. I feel like that should've been the first thing they got rid of.
I note that, in the "lite" version's settings pages, there is no "Content" section.
Does that mean that "Show me the best Tweets first" is enabled, disabled, or follows the setting in the main twitter web app?
I assume the latter, since toggling that setting in the Android app also shows it as toggled in the man web app, which would indicate it is probably an account wide setting.
However, if the "lite" (mobile, really) web app became the only interface, it would mean that we would lose the ability to change that setting, which would suck.
[+] [-] whalesalad|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahoy|9 years ago|reply
This seems like a weird branding/marketing push for what is essentially "we did a performance pass on our mobile website"
[+] [-] PuffinBlue|9 years ago|reply
Looking at them side by side you really get a sense of how much 'stuff' Twitter Heavy has compared to Twitter Lite.
It would be so good if they could apply a bit of this stripped down approach to the main site and really work on list/follow management features.
I'd really love to get more out of Twitter as there are a lot of great people on there but (unless I'm missing something obvious) there doesn't really seems to be many tools built in to help you do that.
[+] [-] tedmiston|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistermann|9 years ago|reply
EDIT: it seems they do not, thank god for that.
[+] [-] janvdberg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewStephens|9 years ago|reply
If Twitter can write a webpage that provides the functionality in only 1Mb then what is in the mobile app?
[+] [-] dublinben|9 years ago|reply
[0] https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=twidere&fdid...
[+] [-] abraham|9 years ago|reply
https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/twitter-inc/
[+] [-] Ruud-v-A|9 years ago|reply
1 MB is “acceptable” by today’s standards, but when you think about it — 1 MB to display a few 140-character tweets?
[+] [-] ascagnel_|9 years ago|reply
For comparison, Tweetbot is 7.6MB and Twitterific is 10.3MB (both on iOS), and they provide a much nicer experience for using Twitter than the official app.
[+] [-] frandroid|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josefresco|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fsiefken|9 years ago|reply
Originally it was a listing of 140c messages, ideal to quickly view the status of your friends to enhance social proprioception. Since then it unfortunately morphed into a bloated, marketing oriented and visual distraction party where it mostly serves the look at me and commercial agendas. Authenticity, tele-awareness, social proprioception and efficienty flew away with the original twitter bird. Did he have a name? Is he coming back one day?
[+] [-] mxuribe|9 years ago|reply
There exists a matrix-to-twitter bridge that I believe allows for this use-case: https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-appservice-twitter
It might only be alpha phase, but why not give it a shot? I'm not the developer for that, but am a happy user of the matrix protocol. Also, there are plenty of users leveraging matrix with several other bridges as well such as irc, slack, gitter, etc.
[+] [-] harrygeez|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtraffic|9 years ago|reply
Things like Lite keep me from deleting my account. But with less spam, I'd probably use my account.
[+] [-] bad_user|9 years ago|reply
I also have direct messages from everybody active. Since enabling it I haven't received any spam. Maybe I've been lucky :)
And I don't have an obscure account (https://twitter.com/alexelcu). Maybe more popular accounts see more spam, I don't know.
[+] [-] Sindisil|9 years ago|reply
1. uBlock origin seems to block ads in the normal web client, but not in the mobile web client (in desktop FireFox as well as mobile FireFox).
2. Mobile twitter client lacks the drop-down menu where you used to be able to choose "I don't like this ad".
Now that I look at it, though, that menu on the main twitter web app doesn't have that option any more, either. You can "report this ad", which isn't quite the same.
To get to the same menu in the mobile web app, you need to tap/click the add tweet, then choose the more options icon.
The normal twitter web app has now added a "dismiss" option on mouseover.
FFS, there's no consistency of interface across the three at all!
[+] [-] vincentriemer|9 years ago|reply
Considering that most ad blockers work by identifying ads through class names, it would explain why uBlock origin wouldn't work on the mobile site.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] warpech|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Artemis2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bharani_m|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afro88|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joelrunyon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] provost|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtruk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bclemens|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dudul|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lauriswtf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucasmullens|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] professorumbra|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qznc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vallavaraiyan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asgeirn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] croon|9 years ago|reply
How did we arrive at a time where it is news-worthy to launch a non-bloated service client?
Or to phrase it differently: What is the claimed consumer gain of a bloated client?
More like this please. It feels like going back in time when I first tried a 100Mbps connection in the late 90s and all the web content was made to accomodate DSL and modems.
[+] [-] unwind|9 years ago|reply
However, as usual you're doing the mistake of somehow thinking that you are a customer of Twitter's. Of course you're not, since you're not paying to use the service.
That turns things around so that you're the usual ad target product, meaning the app might swell to contain more candy to tease you into clicking, and so on.
Uh, and just to be clear I'm not meaning "you" in a very personal sense, this applies to me too when I use Twitter, of course. :)
[+] [-] snackai|9 years ago|reply
E.g. :
Click on the Image -> Only the Image gets larger
Click on the frame around the image -> See the comments and Image is larger.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] qubyte|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slim|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] overcast|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josefresco|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CivilianZero|9 years ago|reply
The constant pop-in/pop-out of the header and footer makes tapping on things just obnoxious enough to make me not want to use it. I know some web apps have removed them, I just don't know why it isn't more common.
Also, it has that little bar at the top to open the site with the app. I feel like that should've been the first thing they got rid of.
[+] [-] Sindisil|9 years ago|reply
Does that mean that "Show me the best Tweets first" is enabled, disabled, or follows the setting in the main twitter web app?
I assume the latter, since toggling that setting in the Android app also shows it as toggled in the man web app, which would indicate it is probably an account wide setting.
However, if the "lite" (mobile, really) web app became the only interface, it would mean that we would lose the ability to change that setting, which would suck.