Although we’re still working on the Tablet PC micro-conversation tracker, you can give it a try live at its temporary, developer home here.
Update: We have a new home for the micro-conversation tracker. Check out http://www.thredr.com.
(Note: This is just a temporary home while we work out bugs and fix up features.)
There are no permalinks in this version so don’t bother looking for them. When we move things over to the real server, we’ll enable those. No reason to collect a bunch of URLs that’ll go bad we figure. So best to leave that feature out for now. You won’t find the RSS feed button yet either. Sorry. Did I say this was a dev version?
How often will the data update? Well, since this is a developer test server as much as anything else, you won’t see much change for the next several days or possibly a week or so. We might update the content a couple times a day or maybe not at all. The changes will most likely be driven by our dev needs. Hope you don’t mind.
Want to see what conversations might look like for another topic? How about conversations underway by the Microsoft developer community? Give it a peek here.
Let us know what you think. Fonts too small? Too big? Too ugly? Not enough links? Bad format? Not useful unless it has XYZ? You name it. You can post your comments here.
I took a quick look at the Tablet PC one and I like the concept/idea. This would lead me to stuff that I would miss otherwise.
But also when I look at the result page it looks suspiciously similar to the random link farms that pages host to try and attract advertising clicks / google search results. So I think some kind of branding or graphic design that makes it clear it’s something more useful and focused than that would really help. Of course if something like this was hosted as part of your blog or GottaBeMobile or whatever that would largely address that.
Also wrt the layout, having the link summaries span the whole display made the reading seem disjointed. If I size my browser down to about 550 pixels across (roughly what you have in your screenshot) then I like the way the text flows with longer breaks between the headlines. But when I fire up my browser typically it’s maximized or close to that, so it is much wider than that and the layout doesn’t look good to me.
The summaries seemed to be about the right amount of text.
I also found it strange that the “Linking” blog was given a hyperlink but not the main blog that hosts the story. Acutally, I am not sure I understand why the linking blog is shown at all – but I assume there is a good reason for this 🙂
Thanks for the suggestions Ken. Yeah, the layout is in transition right now. In fact, there’s no design per se yet. Probably need to move that up the list now as at least we have some “live” data to render.