The Twitter staff numbers under 30 people — which makes the impact of the social media platform all the more surprising. A simple, open tool with a tiny feature set – mobile enabled — flexible. It has spawned all types of support projects, from twitpic to twibble to TweetDeck. Al Gore uses it (of course, didn’t he invent the internet?) and most recently Oprah. It is catching on. And while I resisted in the past, since making the plunge I am finding all sorts of benefits.
Certainly the less is more mantra doesn’t work everywhere, but there may be more room for it in our own software/systems development work than we think. It is always a good test to see what you can do without.
Apple – Business – Profiles – Twitter
Twitter’s meteoric rise to ubiquity is proof positive that the world, in all its complexity, is eager to embrace simplicity. Wielding more impact on social networking than most communication tools this generation has yet seen, Twitter is one of those universal phenomena where the product name self-conjugates. To engage with Twitter is to “tweet.”
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Trip Kirkpatrick added these pithy words on May 04 09 at 9:03 amWhile “less is more” may not work everywhere, there’s another way of reading Twitter that I think is broadly applicable. To me the story of Twitter is this: Create something that does something useful and does it well, have a good UI, and don’t take a lot of time to make it. Put another way, make software that is easy to make, easy to use, and easy to adapt. When software developers do that, it can benefit everyone. Users get a great tool and (likely) a number of adaptations of it. The creators of the software get to either work on enhancements and scaling (if it succeeds) or get to move on to the next project.
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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