A Twitter Prediction. Lamenting Change.
on the Future of the service.
06/26/09
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…