It's actually not a terrible fit for Amazon. Twitter is basically where breaking news happens already, and it's not terribly difficult to imagine an integration between WaPo and Twitter. Gives them a presence in San Francisco as well, and access to Twitter considerable UX/frontend talent, which they can put to use on making AWS more intuitive to use.
I guess there is the issue of WaPo being owned by Bezos directly though, not Amazon.
Is twitter UX considered good? Because my impression is that it's one of the worst UX ever made and has been that consistently for years.
Just one example, trying to view an image on twitter: on the timeline images get cropped to some fixed aspect ration, if you click on them twitter will open its weird mediaviewer popup where the image is not cropped but it is resized to fit an even smaller rectangle. As far as I can tell the only way to see the image at its original resolution is to (1) click on it to open the mediaviewer pseudopopup, (2) right click on the image inside the mediaviewer pseudopopup, (3) select "copy image location", (4) select the URL bar, (5) paste the image URL.
And that's just one example that you would think is easy to fix but apparently isn't, there's many more (threading is shit, clickable areas are unnecessarily huge, sometimes keyboard arrows stop scrolling, there's no distinction between "talking about someone" and "talking to someone", two different "screen name" fields with one or the other being given prominence depending on context...)
You figured out more about how the twitter UI than I ever have. It's a hot mess and I just don't visit the site at all since I could never figure out what the heck I'm looking at.
I think it used to be impressive when they created Bootstrap.
Twitter's website currently is not Responsive. The web interface looks different on every platform (mobile, tablet, desktop). And on mobile, the website is terribly slow.
i've often wondered if they deprioritised the mobile web frontend in order to get people to install their app (especially since they turned hostile towards third party apps). personally, it just took twitter from something i used to check frequently to something i check once or twice a day when i'm in front of a computer.
If you have a moderality complex UI, by making it responsive you are going to ruin it. That's why most serious websites with complex UIs don't bother with responsiveness and have two different interfaces.
This could be debated, atomic components within a framework built for a purpose can still be responsive.
Responsive or adaptive should be choice made at the start of projects and then ideally followed through till the end.
We choose responsive and made atomic components so it can work, but... it has to be in the thought process from design to implementation, the same can be said about adaptive.
Source: Our UI is complex, large, responsive and serves 3 million users and won awards.
I remember low-budget sites before and after bootstrap, and I gotta say that post-bootstrap is way more usable. While you can mess things up with Bootstrap, the limitations help guide you to settle on standard decisions (like their nav bars, verses whatever cute creative thing people would do on their own).
So when you see a website built on bootstrap, you think "oh, that's impressive design" as opposed to "oh, they didn't have any time or money to spend on design"?
I guess there is the issue of WaPo being owned by Bezos directly though, not Amazon.