I like Twitter. I don’t post many comments and when I do, they’re not very exciting. But I “get” Twitter, unlike some people.

However, considering its worldwide success, it lacks basic features. Sorry, what I should say, is that they appear to be concentrating their efforts in the wrong direction. I didn’t really want the new “Ajax” drop down menus on the Followers screen. Neither did I want a swish new login screen.

No, what I wanted was not to be bombarded with “followers” trying to entice me with pornography. I would also like to search through the current more popular tags without them being awash with futher porn enticements and general spam.

Twitter has started to do something – it’s using Google’s Safe Browsing API to get rid of links to spyware and other potentially “dangerous” sites.  But, even that is a half-arsed attempt as it doesn’t work with shortened URLs – something that the majority of URLs on Twitter are.

Any particular reason why? Most shortening services allow you to expand their URL into the original full length version – why isn’t Twitter feeding this into the Google API? Sucuri provide an excellent online example of this.

And this doesn’t prevent all the follower spam or pornography links¹ . Surely it can’t be difficult? New people who turn up and follow hundreds, even thousands of others? Users that are regularly being blocked by others? Can’t Twitter flag this to some kind of adminstrator?

Unfortunately, some of the above behaviours are affecting my enjoyment of the platform. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

1. although I’m not suggesting these later examples are excluded – I’m sure some people would like to legitamiately exchange them [↩]

I’ve been a fan for sometime of Xmarks (aka Foxmarks), which allows you to synchronise your bookmarks and, more recently, your passwords across different computers. I use it exclusively on Firefox but it is also compatible with other browsers as well.

However, I’m a little bit excited by Mozilla Weave – this is Mozilla’s version of, well, the same idea. It’s Open Source though and currently available as a Beta release. For this reason I haven’t replaced XMarks with it, but after a “quick go” with it, I’m more than a little impressed.

Weave will run silently in the background synchronising much more than Xmarks does and, more importantly, it does it without affecting your browser session. I have such automatic updates switched off with Xmarks because it causes my Firefox to grind to a halt. This might have something to do with my thousands of bookmarks. Even a manual sync takes some time¹. Weave, in comparison, was unnoticeable and, when running it’s initial sync, you can continue browsing without any issues.

The one thing that Xmarks has over Weave is the ability to view bookmarks online but, to be honest, that’s not a facility I use. More recently they’ve been adding more and more features, away from the basic synchronising, probably to differentiate between itself and Weave (which was announced some time ago). However, none of these have been of interest, so I’ve simply switched them off.

If it continues to impress as it has already, I’m looking forward to the first non-beta release. Sorry, XMarks.

1. although I have noticed that this has got better recently [↩]