The latest version of Mastodon includes search functionality. It's early days, but seems to work pretty well. Here are some of the interesting things I found when using it. Search is complex - expectations I don't mean the act of searching a database - that's routine - but I mean it is socially complex. Lots of people left Twitter because it was too easy to search for them. For example, if you really hate people who support the wrong football team, it's trivial to search Twitter for people…
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I found this rather humorous Tweet in which a computer issued a cheque for £2,324,252,080,110: Gareth Hughes@gh230277Thank you for our compensation payment @Northpowergrid for the several days we were without power following #stormarwen Before I bank the cheque however, are you 100% certain you can afford this? #trillionpounds pic.x.com/z5mnc2nxl1❤️ 51,914💬 2,191♻️ 011:52 - Sat 12 February 2022 I wondered whether 2324252080110 was a common sort of mistake - like a 32 bit overflow - so I Google…
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Computers would be so much better if they never had to deal with users, amirite?!!? I remember, years ago, working on a mobile web service which had a URl bar - so users could tap in bbc.co.uk on their T9 keypads - and a separate search bar. I thought that was pretty nifty. But it turns out, users tried searching for URls and they tried going to "http:// When is the Next Bus?". Bloody users!! Users find input bars confusing. A good example of this is Amazon's search bar. It faithfully…
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I spotted this poster today, encouraging people to search for the Twitter hashtag "#Transformers". Wouldn't it make sense to use a QR code as well? That way people could quickly scan, and be taken straight to the discussion, rather than have to fire up Twitter and do a manual search. As it happens, it's slightly tricky to make a QR code which searches for a Twitter hashtag. There are two things to note: Twitter's search URLs are annoyingly different from every other search URL on the …
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