Being the interaction designer at Twitter, I should probably jump in here ;-)
First of all, thanks for taking the time to talk about our service - it's nice to work on something that encourages discussion, positive or otherwise. Before I get going, I should point out that I only joined the team in December, so although I can talk about early design decisions, I wasn't present for them. So, when we talk about limitations with regard to Twitter, it's good to also think about the constraints that we've built into the service. We've found that these constraints actually encourage use, so perhaps it helps to dive a little deeper into what a couple of the most important ones are and why. First, the 140 character limit. This was mainly to do with the origin of Twitter as a mobile service - it was originally designed to work with SMS. But this constraint is a very important one - it encourages people to update (because you don't feel like you have to sit for ages writing an enormous post like I find myself doing now) and it is responsible for the "ambientness" of the service (the updates you produce are easy to digest for the people who receive them), among other things. (This ambient nature of Twitter and other services is an area worthy of separate discussion - Leisa Reichelt coined the term "ambient intimacy" around a year ago, and talked at the Reboot conference around it - if you haven't seen it already, the slides and a blog entry are essential reading: http://www.disambiguity.com/reboot-90-ambient-intimacy/) Secondly, the question - "what are you doing?" - helps our users to frame the conversation. Of course, people are now quite happy to avoid answering the question at all, and use @ and direct messages as a way of communicating seamlessly across the devices which we support. But having the question there is a trigger for use - it means that a new user (or even someone who has been using the service for a while) never sits looking at a blank input box thinking of something to type - there is a prompt. And you can always answer "what are you doing?", because you're always doing something, even if it is incredibly mundane (An aside: this is also the cause of many of the charges against Twitter - people assume that the conversations on Twitter are just responses to that question, and by extension are not interesting at all. As with most things, it makes a lot more sense once you start to use it.) Also, as David mentioned earlier, if there is a use which we don't cover with any of service touchpoints, then we have our API which people have already built some fantastic stuff on. And we're completely happy with this - our goal as a company is to become a global communications utility, the framework on top of which people exchange short messages between each other with whichever device they happen to be next to. We don't want to (and couldn't - we're still only a tiny company) build everything that we'd like to, which is why it's great when other people do. We have a million and one ideas for how we would like to improve the service, but my background (as a service designer) makes me always think of how the whole service works together rather than just a single touchpoint. So we'd always try to add features that make sense across all the ways people access and use our service (which are currently web, mobile web, SMS and IM). Also, as communication is our core offering - it's what we as a service are about - any feature we do add will always be related to that. As for the future: well, currently, my main concern has been tidying up a few things about how the web UI works (as we've been constrained for engineering resource to actually build new stuff), but I've also been working on some really exciting new features, which we hope to launch soon - some of them are perhaps more obvious than others. Finally, I should also say that I'm more than happy to continue this discussion privately or receive suggestions from anyone who'd like to offer them. There's plenty more to discuss, which I hopefully will be doing via various channels soon! Thanks, Ben . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=27964 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
