Mockup

Here is the mockup I promised. As I described in my last post, the feed icon appears on the left of the event.

The relative date time tag (which says 'About x minutes ago') now appears inline. I tried it underneath the event description but it was confusing. Having it off to the side means you really only 'see' it if you're looking for it. It also means we can imlement single-line events (such as the Gmail event in the mockup), which I like.

I debated for a while whether to include profile thumbnails (shown here for Twitter and Facebook events) at all, or to simply leave them out. I did mockups of both, but I think the thumbnails help 'suggest' to the user who the post came from, much better than text can. For example, if I were interested in posts from Fake Stephen Conroy (shown in my mockup), it's far easier to locate them given his bright red profile image. That said, it also makes the feed as a whole a little more crowded, so it was a trade off.

You may also notice the comments line under the Facebook post. I'm hoping to add support for comments when I implement this new design. They're not shown here, but clicking on the '6 comments' text in blue will expand down the comments. Each comment will have the profile picture of the author (if applicable). The last line in the comments section will be a text box for you to add a comment.

One other thing: I'm going to limit the width of the description field. See Senator Conroy's Twitter post? Under the current design, that stretches across the width of the feed and is difficult to read (that's why newspapers use columns). In the new mockup, it's constrained to about half the total event width.

If anyone has any feedback or suggestions, I'd love to hear it.

BTW, still no news on MySpace. I've posted to their forums, but I guess their API developers don't read it. I may end up just submitting an e-mail to a non-developer address and hoping they'll forward it to the appropriate department.