Solo Technology

Last time I wrote about Socialthing, my biggest beef was that their web page doesn’t auto-refresh. I think Socialthing is a nice and low-impact way to follow folks in various social networks, but having to remember to lean over and hit F5 from time to time annoys me (yeah, perhaps I’m too easily annoyed…). From a tweet:

Well, the product is in beta and they do take feedback, so I decided to go offer some. Not surprisingly, someone had already beat me to it with a feedback message titled, “Auto refresh would be spiffy.“

With a great title like that, I had no choice but to add my +1 to the topic! I have been keeping an eye on it since then just to see what the final response would be.

That issue received a nice reply yesterday:

In the next iteration, we go out and look for new updates every 15 minutes (for most services, as services like Twitter will have the ability to refresh faster). Whenever these new updates come in, we inform you that there are X new updates available, you can then choose to load them in or ignore it. We decided upon this way of doing it because otherwise, if you’re in the middle of reading something at that 15 minute mark, and it automatically loads in new info, it might move you around in the page and become confusing.

You know what? While it seems a bit over-rationalized it does make sense. I look forward to this “next iteration” — and hope we don’t have to wait too long to see it… I find Socialthing works nicely towards some of my “social bankruptcy” concerns.

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