unity-design team mailing list archive

[topdownjimmy <topdownjimmy@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 7:17 AM, Conscious User <conscioususer@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > I think this does quite a lot for clearing up the purpose of that field.
> > But if you just look at that without prior/external knowledge, you still
> > would have to ask: Say where? To whom?
>
> I agree. In fact, seconds after sending the mockup I wondered if it
> wouldn't confuse users into thinking it was a IM reply field, like
> the gnome-shell message tray:
>
> http://people.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/mockups/20090630/04-chat-details.png
>
> As much as I hate to admit it (and God knows how much I do), I don't
> think that there is a brand-neutral word as effective as that dreadful
> word, "tweet".

Maybe rather than lamenting the fact that there isn't an established
service-agnostic term for tweeting/denting/status-ing, we can see this
as an opportunity to coin one and put some momentum behind it.  It's
something people have desired for a long time anyway.

The only reasonable candidate I can think of at the moment is "shout,"
which benefits from (a) being both a noun and a verb, and (b) being
familiar as a result of "shoutboxes" -- which don't serve precisely
the same function, of course, but are similar in that they're public
messages.