How basic is Twitter?
Like so many others in the tech blogging world, I've spent the last few weeks exploring Twitter. I understand that there were lots of people using it before me, and before that, the developers of Twitter envisioned something that all the rest of us didn't.
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter went from curiosity to the dominant topic on tech blogs within weeks of the argument that it matters at all: by mid-March 2007 it was the talk of SXSW in Austin, where it and Dodgeball were flaunted as the two rival social-messaging services letting users broadcast to a friends list. Reaction split hard — one blogger called it inane and socially risky while predicting an imminent implosion, even as adoption kept climbing.
Dave Winer has been working through this arc himself: two weeks ago he sketched where Twitter might go next, predicting it would be hacked into a genuinely useful service, and the same circle proposed wiring home devices through it. 'How basic is Twitter?' is his assessment after those weeks of use — asking whether the service's extreme simplicity is a limitation or precisely the raw material others will extend.
First-order effects
- Twitter exits SXSW 2007 with the mindshare win over Dodgeball, making it the default social-messaging service the tech blog world builds conversations around.
- Developers and bloggers who spent March exploring the service now face a choice between treating it as a toy — the 'inane' critique — or extending it past basic broadcast messaging.
Second-order effects
- Rival services like Dodgeball are pressured to differentiate on features Twitter's minimalism lacks, since the contest is now for the same friends-list broadcasting habit rather than separate audiences.
- Proposed extensions such as home-device control depend on Twitter exposing more than its core text-messaging surface, so user demand pushes the service toward becoming a platform others program against.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — a deliberately basic core that outsiders hack toward usefulness — social messaging consolidates the way blogging did: one simple protocol-shaped service at the center, with an ecosystem defining what it becomes.
- The debate over whether simplicity or richness wins determines which of the rival services survives as infrastructure and which fades as a feature.
The trend: Social messaging in 2007 is following blogging's trajectory: a radically simple service wins mindshare first, then extensibility — not features — decides whether it hardens into a platform.