QOTD: 11/1/13

” If there’s one lesson to take from every major change in how people browse the internet over the last five years — the rise of infinite feeds, the gradual retirement of slideshows and pagination, the explosion of very tall, vertically interactive page layouts — it’s that users hate to click and don’t mind scrolling. Taps are expensive, swiping is cheap. Clicking is a choice, like jumping; scrolling is inevitable, like falling.”

Why Twitter Just Turned Itself Inside Out – Buzzfeed

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about how the changes to Twitter, which bring fully-viewable images – and Vines – in-stream as opposed to only being available if you clicked “in” to the tweet, make it more like Instagram or Facebook. But those criticisms don’t quite hit home for me since the experience on Twitter is still massively different than on either of those networks.

For one thing, Twitter allows for easy sharing whereas Instagram has no native “reshare” functionality. For another, in order to do comment or reply to something on Facebook you have to click twice. So there’s still a lot of difference between the networks.

Sure, it’s a big change but along with the fact that you can now Retweet, Favorite and Reply all in-stream as well I’m guessing this will make Tweets even more engaging. And, considering this change was seen as a “gimme” to advertisers, that was likely the whole damn point.

By Chris Thilk

Chris Thilk is a freelance writer and content strategist with over 15 years of experience in online strategy and content marketing. He lives in the Chicago suburbs.