Web Development Live

I love dedicated to covering the incoming hurricane. But each Twitter post is a headline, a truncated sentence and a link to the original story on Chron.com. They’re just copy-pasting stories and press releases. In many of the “tweets,” you get very little information out of the headline and the first few words. Even worse, the important information is cut off…

But the value of Twitter in this circumstance is it delivers self-contained news updates to mobile users who may or may not be able to access to the site — and probably don’t have the time, as many folks are getting ready to evacuate. So this is doing more damage than it’s worth. Lesson: when using different forms of delivery, you need to tailor the content for that particular platform. This is just Twitter shovelware.

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, the online file storage and sharing web application, came out of beta yesterday — and it looks set to become an indispensable tool. Installed on your own machine(s), the Dropbox client syncs your chosen local folder with your Dropbox account (using Amazon’s S3 storage), which you can also access via their web interface or your iPhone. Items can be flagged as public and shared with others via a URL, generated through the app.

While most responsible developers will probably have some kind of backup system in place already, the ability to quickly share screenshots and files with friends and colleagues — especially if you’re behind a firewall that prevents FTP access — is very welcome. And best of all it’s free!

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This week, Digital Web is happy to welcome , Jason owns up to the role of stock art, and offers tips how to effectively use it for your next project.

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There have been a couple of great presentations either side of lunch here at dConstruct. (Pownce, Digg) shared his recommendations on how to approach the key pain points when designing for social interaction.

Keep an eye out for the are on SlideShare — when I find Josh’s I’ll post the link here too.

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The UK arm of Digital Web (editor Frances Berriman and me) are at Brighton’s annual is up first, drawing parallels between modern information design and cholera epidemics (London’s “social network of dead people”, as he puts it).

Also in evidence is Clearleft’s , dispensing promotional bananas (yes, really) to the assembled geeks. If you’re at the conference, please come and say hi!

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New products, plugins, and announcements have been coming thick and fast in the last couple of weeks, but here are some of the interesting posts we’ve been reading:

• Peter-Paul Koch in the new beta of IE8, and notes that its “backwards-compatibility mode” doesn’t actually emulate older browsers correctly;
• Jon Hicks by pointing out that all of their UI enhancements have actually been done before;
• Chris at Particletree arrangement at Wufoo, which includes a 2pm lie-in on a Friday — sounds good to me!
• and David “Fat Businessman” Thompson — are you careful enough with your passwords?

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