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Submission + - How To Fix Twitter (dcurt.is)

An anonymous reader writes: Dustin Curtis succinctly breaks down Twitter's biggest problems, and how they can be fixed. Some of the problems are technological — they way they've decided to handle multimedia objects is arbitrary and annoying, and their inclusion of third-party modules is inconsistent and behind the times. Other problems are more central to what Twitter is about: "[F]or normal users, Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast system. ... Twitter responses are difficult to read on the website–with that weird accordion expansion UI that only shows 5 responses and makes it impossible to follow a coherent conversation." The biggest problem is in Twitter's utility for browsing real-time information, which should be its strength: "When I open Twitter during a major debate in the US, or when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge fucking banner at the top that says 'follow this breaking event.' It shouldn’t just search for a hashtag–it should use intelligent algorithms to show me all of the relevant content about that event.
Games

Revisiting the "Holy Trinity" of MMORPG Classes 362

A feature at Gamasutra examines one of the foundations of many MMORPGs — the idea that class roles within such a game fall into three basic categories: tank, healer, and damage dealer. The article evaluates the pros and cons of such an arrangement and takes a look at some alternatives. "Eliminating specialized roles means that we do away with boxing a class into a single role. Without Tanks, each class would have features that would help them participate in and survive many different encounters like heavy armor, strong avoidance, or some class or magical abilities that allow them to disengage from direct combat. Without specialized DPS, all classes should be able to do damage in order to defeat enemies. Some classes might specialize in damage type, like area of effect (AoE) damage; others might be able to exploit enemy weaknesses, and some might just be good at swinging a sharpened bit of metal in the right direction at a rapid rate. This design isn't just about having each class able to fill any trinity role. MMO combat would feel more dynamic in this system. Every player would have to react to combat events and defend against attacks."
Privacy

Submission + - Privacy study shows Google's eyes are everywhere (bizjournals.com) 1

BrianWCarver writes: "The San Francisco Business Times reports that researchers at UC Berkeley's School of Information have released a study and launched a website, knowprivacy.org, in which they found that web bugs from Google and its subsidiaries were found on 92 of the top 100 Web sites and 88 percent of the approximately 400,000 unique domains examined in the study. This larger data set was provided by the maintainer of a Firefox plugin called Ghostery which shows users which web bugs are on the sites they visit. The study also found that while the privacy policies of many popular websites claim that the sites do not share information with third parties, they do allow third parties to place web bugs on their sites (which collect this information directly, typically without the user's knowledge) and share with corporate "affiliates." The full report and more findings are available from their website."

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