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It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.

yahoo TV refreshed, redux and rejected

Okay, I'm sick of it now, like many others. I was dazzled by the AJAX pagination technique at first, because I think it's an interesting advance in AJAX in general. But, I've been a user of the Yahoo! TV Grid - er Listings - for years now. It's useless to me now, even after I re-discovered its location after my bookmark broke. I hate to be harsh, but I'd outsourced a part of my brain the Yahoo! TV Grid, and suddenly that part of my brain is damaged.

Update: I've just noticed that this entry's linked to by Dave Winer, so maybe I'm in danger of being read. :) To be not-so-harsh, I had posted some suggestions to the above-linked blog entry, but I'm not sure if they'll get through the moderation queue. Nothing sinister expected or asserted, just an overload of voices to which I'm but a late piler-on.

Basically, I'd be made happy by Yahoo! TV if they treated the TV listings grid as a valued entry point with in-context links to discussions and reviews from the the shows listed, and if they dropped the AJAX pagination to present the entire grid at once for in-browser search and random access visual scanning. This relatively new AJAX pagination technique is pretty sweet, but better applied to data sets ordered by relevance and / or expected to be traversed in one direction.

Also, a note in general to other redesign teams: Watch your entry points and don't break bookmarks unexpectedly.

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