Just curious - what are the sources of the feed? Are these the latest feeds from the whole of twitter?
Oh boy! Another great reason to buy premium Thanks Shawn, it's an awesome addition! Getting premium real soon!
It's a bit of an experiment right now... so it's not an "official" premium feature yet... might still change it depending on how it goes the next few days.
Honestly, didn't like much. Basically, it's more like a distraction than a luxury. On top of every forum wherever I got, it's just there dying to get my attention. I had to remind myself a numerous times since morning that what actually I was doing before being distracted with that scroll. The idea isn't bad, but the implementation probably is. Or at least, provide the users the option in their profile to disable seeing that thing. Just my 2 cents. I myself am a Premium member, yet I am on the other side.
Shawn I respect you for making this great forum but this feature is annoying as it can get . It's basically spam forced down your eyes .
Yeah, it's kind of an experiment... The original intent was I needed a place for the Facebook and Twitter buttons. The problem was it was a lot of blank space afterwards... So it was an idea of what to do with the blank space. Might change it to be used for system messages or something (or maybe a combination).
This is a very interesting idea, in the beginning many people will find it distracting but then people even find ads distracting. Anyways if distraction is a big problem what you could do is remove the scroll feature. Only one message/page.
Another problem with it is the Twitter API doesn't let you see the replies or retweets... so you only get to see basic tweets. Hopefully they fix it soon... http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=1167 Also... might start looking at other stats about the accounts to play with prioritizing tweets somehow (like people with a ton of followers but few people they follow probably have more interesting things to say).
I wouldn't keep it there too much longer... its basically free advertisements, that's gotta have a knock-on effect to your advertising program. Maybe if the messages where removed but the users avatar and name remained and placement was just before the tweet button... it would then maybe be a nice perk for premium members without distraction to others.
People are complaining because its new and it distracts them. Google ads are also there and they don't distract us because it has become a habit and also that we see ads on almost every website. After some days its going to be ok seeing that. I vote up to let this feature remain.
Free advertisements? AFAIK my premium membership isn't free I like the idea of these tweets, but it could still improve, but I'm sure it will
eh.. exactly, so why would they/you, purchase advertisements from the existing platform. Or more to the point, why would someone like myself purchase advertising... when its cheaper to become a premium member.
I am going to have to agree with a couple of people allready, it is annoying as heck. I would become a Premium member if it gave me an option to hide it though! ;o)
Because you have the advertisements in own hands. You can pay for the keywords, banners and it's more sure that your ad will be viewed. Those tweets are chosen between a few hundred, thousand other tweets from all premium members. The chance someone clicks is bigger with an advertisement then from that Twitter link IMO.
I've rebuilt the framework a bit so the backend supports different Twitter feeds on a per forum basis. That should be able to let us give more relevant Twitter feeds depending on the forum you are in. As a test, the Google related forums/threads are feeding from here: http://twitter.com/#!/digitalpoint/google