Twitter and the Power of Keeping Things Simple

To the point where people increasingly learn about news events first via the social network, and if a celebrity doesn't have a Twitter account it seems unusual. The tweet clock recently clicked over the 10-billion-tweet mark, and about 50 million of them are posted every day. I don't remember exactly when I first discovered Twitter (although according to this service, my first tweet was March 9 of 2007) but Om recalls that he first posted about it in July of 2006, after someone showed him a cool new mobile SMS service then called Twitter a side project from the guys behind Odeo (a podcasting service that was later shut down sold).

Om said it was cool but also looked like it could be really annoying, and that it was really simple, and appeared to be going viral. All of those observations turned out to be fairly prescient: Twitter was cool but could also be annoying, was really simple and eventually went viral. But I would argue that of all those things, the most important by far is that Twitter was and still is incredibly simple. Simple to sign up and simple to use (I think being annoying also helped, but that's an argument for another time). Its true that there was some initial confusion around whether users should use text-messaging on their phones, and the whole short code thing was kind of a blind alley for some new users, but people figured it out pretty quickly, and most eventually used it through the website or through a Twitter app for their iPhone or Blackberry.

Simplicity is one of those things everyone says they really admire and respect and strive for, but very few really do particularly when it comes to a new product or service. Gmail creator and FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit hinted at this in his post about not letting the good become the enemy of the great. With a lot of new things, there is relentless pressure in many cases from designers and engineers to add features. After all, it has to have as many as those other services out there, or users will think that it isn't as good. More features makes it better, right?

This is wrong, of course. In most cases, the best thing to do is to focus on what you think people might do with it, and then make it the best at doing that specific thing, and nothing else. Whether by design or by accident, or some combination of the two, Twitter did this brilliantly (Biz Stone talked about the process in this interview). In fact, the service was so simple that it was almost hard to explain to a non-user what the big deal was about this Twitter thing. What do I do with it? Type into the box. But what should I say? Whatever you want to say. I don't get it. And so on.