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Twitter - the simplicity you can’t escape
via WinExtra by Steven Hodson on January 27, 2008
I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that you mention Twitter any other place than in conversations with bloggers or other early adopter and you get strange looks being made in your direction and hushed conversations just out of ear shout about how you are one strange person. That’s okay - don’t let it get you down because chances are the next time you get together one more of your friends will have fallen - that is if they don’t add you as a friend first and message you about how cool Twitter is. But don’t tell anyone else will be the next message.I’ve been using Twitter myself pretty well daily since it first started getting mention in the blogosphere during a SXSW conference but I almost didn’t because - well the Twitter page is just to much of a useless interface to a great service. That was one of the reasons that I started writing TwitBox in the first place; and the same reason why I continue to work on it. This was only possible because the folk behind Twitter made a very smart decision from day one and that was to get a public API out there ASAP. This is one of the areas that has caused Pownce to lag behind I think.
As good as Twitter might be using the web interface it gets tons better using any one of the many clients that are available for it. Developers have gone to town adding features to both desktop and web Twitter clients and it isn’t slowing down in the least. Twitter related links are popping up all over the place whether it be auto posting to your Twitter timeline when you post a Seesmic or Qik video to being able to share what you are listening to with links to cool added value information about it.
Even though Twitter has been trying hard to make on-going improvements to its service one of the most talked about things among those who use the service is how unstable that service can be at times. It is instability that prompted Shel Israel to write his post An Open Letter to the Twitter guys which has been sparking follow-up conversation throughout the tech blogosphere. Along with that has been a flurry of posts from those who have been using Twitter for a long time passing along their thoughts on why; and how, they use it and what they would like to see added to the service.
As good as tips are on number of friends and followers to have; or using it as a feed to bring added value of some kind to your work, the idea of Twitter adding more features on top of what they already have doesn’t appeal to me. It is the very simplicity of Twitter that has been its driving force forward. There is no arcane language to learn in order to use it. There is no excessive joining procedures that need to be followed in order to use Twitter. Hell if all you want is to simply load up the page in your browser and type away well .. it’s as simple as that.
It is this experience of simplicity that makes Twitter accessible to absolutely everyone with a computer. If you want more features well at that point you can try out one of the many desktop or web based clients that have a wide variety of additional features for you.
If Twitter were to add more features my only suggestion to the development team is enrich the public API with those new things. Let the developers that have sprung up around Twitter and follow it faithfully be the ones to bring the new features to the masses.
For Twitter simplicity was the killer application feature - please keep it that way.
Conversation Tags: Twitter, simplicity, social networks
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