web design

I have a problem with mobile-first design.

I spend a lot of time every day sitting in front of three 1920x1080 screens. That's 6,220,800 pixels to play with, and web developers are not using them well. Take Twitter.com, for example: the Tweet column is 496 pixels wide. That's 26% of the width of just one of my screens for all of the content on the site that I'm supposed to read and engage with. When I'm sitting 3 feet away, the text is small, and it's a small target for my mouse (I've sped up the cursor so I can efficiently pan across screens).

I've been building open-source social networking software for the past four years, which has given me the unique opportunity to be involved in a wide variety of projects to build social networks and related tools. My experience has revealed a number of insights into the way that user interaction patterns are designed on websites that encourage a website's engagement and adoption to the point that it can grow organically from almost nothing – or, conversely, that doom a website to silent irrelevance in a distant corner of the web.

As the maintainer of the Facebook-style Statuses module for the Drupal content management system, I like to read around the web and see what kinds of statistics and innovations I can find on comparable systems. This week, there was a gold mine that indicates that the "status movement" is going to grow its already expansive online presence exponentially.