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Something I’ve seen on a few sites lately is really large textboxes on signup/sign in forms. I’m not sure how I feel about them. In most cases, sites have used this fairly effectively with only a few fields requiring entry. But when I’m on my 13″ Macbook Pro, I have to scroll to see the submit button at the bottom.

The other thing that large textboxes does is eliminate other possibilities for these pages, like using the sign up form as a qualifier. Joshua Porter, the author of that article also recently gave a presentation that has really inspired me lately. Highly recommended.

I’ve been using Brizzly almost exclusively as my twitter client lately on the desktop. It’s not perfect, but compared to twitter.com, I really enjoy the additional features and attention to detail that was put into it. One of the things I really like is the way they annotate the twitter trends. Twitter does this too – using What the Trend? to provide their descriptions. What’s cool about Brizzly is that it invites it’s users to help out:

I’ve found that I pay a lot more attention to Twitter trends this way. Twitter has become my go-to for what’s happening with the things I’m interested in. It’s most fun to check out during Yankees games these days – I hope that doesn’t change for a few more weeks! Go Yankees!

Also, for Twitter on the go, check out Tweetie 2, it’s awesome.

I’m a wine drinker so I was naturally curious to check out one of Gary Vaynerchuk’s new ventures: Cinderella Wine. The concept is simple, one wine is sold a day starting at midnight and the sale continues (often heavily discounted) until it’s sold out. One thing I really like about the site’s design is what happens when the wine sells out, the photo of the wine bottle is replaced by a pumpkin.

It fits the site’s namesake perfectly and adds an air of whimzy that I’d love to see a bit more of.