[gb] Studio

I’ll say this up front: I sincerely (and selfishly) wish I had written and posted this months ago. I posed the following argument to a friend not long after I had become hooked on Twitter, and frankly, had I written about it then, I would’ve looked like a genius at the outset of the fix replies debacle. Instead, you’ll have to take my argument for what it may (or may not) be worth now:

Twitter will feature-add itself out of existence.

Huh? Let me explain: Twitter is brilliant because of its simplicity and the way it lends itself to being an open and public messaging/broadcasting platform. These basic tenents are what differentiated it and helped it become what it is today among a host of other more “traditional” social network sites.

I would go so far as to say that the ultimate genius of Twitter is its lack of features.

I would go so far as to say that the ultimate genius of Twitter is its lack of features. There are no groups, there are no sub-sets or tiers of users. No special treatment. Up until Twitter “fixed confusing replies” (as they originally put it), everyone saw what everyone else wrote (unless they chose not to). You are valuable to people on Twitter if they listen to you and find value in what you say. On some level, Twitter stumbled into what it is today. It would be hard to come up with a more simple structure for a social network if you tried. Simplicity is the genius of Twitter. But there is a problem…

Simple is hard.

SaaS company 37signals has a long history of talking about the importance of saying ‘no’ to new features. It’s not that they never add something new or change something about an app they build, but their basic premise is that saying ‘yes’ too quickly may have unintended consequences in the long run. By extension, it’s ultimately harder to remove a feature from an app (particularly without angering your users) than it is to add one.

I think that as humans, we have a natural tendency to add-to and evolve the things we build.

However, I think that as humans, we have a natural tendency to add-to and evolve the things we build. And when the things we build become public and now involve other people, those people put additional pressure on our own natural tendency to build features and add “stuff”. This is why simple is hard. It’s certainly hard to achieve at the outset, but it’s even harder to maintain.

Twitter + Features

…they’re now at a critical turning point in their existence. They’re starting to add features that could ultimately change the service itself and make it into something else.

From a public perspective, until the replies issue, Twitter had a pretty good track record of making measured and careful decisions about what features to add to their service. Most of those features evolved from how users themselves used the service (replies, hashtags, direct messages, etc.). But I think they’re now at a critical turning point in their existence. They’re starting to add features that could ultimately change the service itself and make it into something else.

The following is only speculation, but based off of their varied public response to the replies situation (to paraphrase, we heard everything from “we’re clearing up confusion” to “our servers couldn’t handle it” to “we’ve got a better solution coming”), it seems to me that the ultimate goal in changing how replies worked was related to new features that have yet to be released. It’s possible we’ll see some kind of custom groups, multiple streams, or other wacky parsing of the current single-stream feed we all experience. This may not be bad, but it will be very different and it will affect user behavior and interaction on the site. Moreover, it will add a lot of complexity to the current experience.

Another example is the addition of “Trending Topics” to the site’s page design. Overnight trends became a new way to get noticed, hold contests, protest news events, and yes, ultimately spam. Again, not necessarily bad, but different and introducing yet another layer of complexity.

I think you see where I’m going with this…

I can’t help but think that the simplicity and usefulness that originally hooked me on Twitter is already becoming somewhat lost.

Features aren’t bad. Change isn’t necessarily bad. But I can’t help but think that the simplicity and usefulness that originally hooked me on Twitter is already becoming somewhat lost. In efforts to appease a lot of stakeholders: investors, large corporations looking for a voice, the arrival of “the Oprah masses” en masse, and possibly their own, natural, built-in desire for change, I think Twitter will add features in a way that kills its current form. They may end up with many more eyeballs on the other end, but I’m skeptical that it will be for the better.

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