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Five Quick Suggestions to Improve TechMeme
TechMeme is one of my most visited and favorite Web sites. It does a great job of organizing the most discussed tech news. I always smile when I see CN listed. I have kept a list of suggestions over the past month and here are five that could be implemented relatively quickly.
Suggestion #1 – Search
Why is there no search? I should be able to plug in a term (i.e. Blockbuster) and see the stories that have hit TechMeme over a given time period. There is an "archive" option but who can remember which time (including seconds!) to put in. Stories on TechMeme move so much during a 15-minute period that it makes it nearly impossible to get it just right.
Suggestion #2 – No Uppercase
This seems to apply mainly to the good people at Cnet who believe that yelling the titles of their stories at us is best. But there are many offenders to the uppercase titles. Let's have TechMeme fix this with a simple CSS code addition to the titles section.
Suggestion #3 – Better Font Usage
See my illustration below. TechMeme currently uses Arial as the text font. My suggestion is to change it to Tahoma and add a pinch of line spacing to make it easier to read and easier on the eyes. Arial is so like yesterday!
Suggestion #4 – Facebook App
Who doesn't have a Facebook App these days! Scoble would love it!
Suggestion #5 – Create a linkback option
Similar to Technorati, TechMeme could create an awesome linkback search option. I put in a URL, and it finds who else has linked to that story in the "TechMeme format".
You missed the most important one: permalinks for individual “stories”
Great suggestions! TechMeme is one of the first and last websites i look at during a working day. I use it because it’s simple, easy to digest and doesn’t overload me with unnecessary information and functionality. I expect the service to evolve over time, but i hope it remains true to its very simple roots.
Thanks Alen. Yep, search would be an improvement! On uppercase: no comprehensive CSS fix exists…think about it, how would CSS know when “us” should be “US” (as in “USA”) or “us” (as in “we”). On fonts: hmmm, very subjective. I think I’d need to do a study!
Techmeme needs more than UI tweaks. They need to hire someone to do a complete redesign because it looks really bad.