unity-design team mailing list archive

[Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi topdownjimmy,


On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 02:04, topdownjimmy <topdownjimmy@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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<http://people.gnome.org/%7Emccann/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.
>

"shout" is insufficiently generic IMO, it has a strong bias towards
aggression and loudness, which would scare people away from using it for any
soft, sad or sensitive content to be microblogged.