Shannon Whitley

I am hooked.  Twitter is one of the first things that I check in the morning and the last thing that I check at night.  I’ve connected with so many interesting and smart people.  It’s a huge asset to me, both professionally and personally.

I completely understand the service and how it works, but I still don’t understand the company, Twitter.  What are their goals?  What do they have planned?  What is their application release approach?

It’s not that I want to see Twitter change substantially.  Its beauty is its simplicity…

I don’t understand Twitter’s approach to application changes.  Although they don’t make many major changes to Twitter functionality, they’ve made a lot of minor interface changes recently.  The changes seem to come at random times and then suddenly change again or revert.  For example, the search box was suddenly moved to the bottom of the page.  A lot of people questioned that change (Who looks to the bottom of a page for the search box?).  Then, a few hours later, the search box was at the top of the page.  Great move.  Way to be responsive, but it seemed so random.  Is it really that easy to completely change the Twitter interface?  To me, as an IT guy, those types of changes represent a lack of process.  If you are properly developing and designing changes to an application, hopefully you’d determine ahead of time that the search box should not go at the bottom of the page, but it would also be difficult to change the location from hour-to-hour.  Your process should have set migration times, and you would only make changes to your application immediately if there was a major bug.  So it seems to me that Twitter doesn’t have a process, at least for changes to their page layout.

The second thing that I don’t understand about Twitter is the lack of substantial functionality changes.  I don’t have any idea what their plans are for adding features to Twitter.  Is there a roadmap?  A lot of third parties are adding applications that improve Twitter, but I wonder how many might suddenly be wiped out if Twitter introduces its own enhancements.  However, I haven’t seen a major functionality change in Twitter for months.  Facebook, in comparison, is constantly innovating.  Twitter is stagnant.  It’s not that I want to see Twitter change substantially.  Its beauty is its simplicity, but I’m sure there must be some enhancements in the works.  Do they have a "Version X" that they’re working on.  I don’t know, and I don’t understand why they wouldn’t communicate their plans.

So, yes, I love Twitter, and I think I might be a little addicted.  I suppose it’s an addiction to the people and their ideas, more than the service itself.  I just don’t understand Twitter in so many other ways.  What the heck are they planning for the future?  Is it just a game of "wait for the acquisition?"  Too bad.  There are so many amazing things that the Twitter developers could do with the power of their tool, and their supportive users.