What Dave Winer doesn’t get – it’s about the simplicity

Dave Winer wrote a nice long historical review ala diatribe yesterday on why Twitter is destined to either fail or be surpassed by some young snot-nosed upstart. He uses the example of VisiCalc versus Lotus 1-2-3 and how because the big brains (egos) behind VisiCalc didn’t listen to the smart guy who actually used the software and listened to the users was quickly overshadowed. As nice a story as that might be it is only Dave’s prelude to his spiel about how Twitter should be – which from his ideas would end up a bloated cumbersome web app.

First off let’s look at some of the reasons why Twitter has possibly taken off the way it has. If there is one thing that is the big neon sign point to its success it is that Twitter knew (what Dave has missed) to

Generally you can look at just about any Web 2.0 web application and they all have that very low entry bar of how it is used. If there was one key that developers brought to Web 2.0 and services like Twitter it was that simplicity for the user was tantamount. Twitter has had competitors but where are they now and why didn’t they succeed?

Because they forgot the key – K.I.S.S.

Both Jaiku and Pownce have vanished into the bowels of bigger companies because they couldn’t get the traction they needed. They didn’t get this traction because they believed that if they provided more bells and whistles than Twitter they could blow it out of the water. Twitter stayed the course and as time has shown us they are still here.

However Twitter did one other very smart thing – they pulled a Microsoft and went for the developers. While their competitors were still trying to out bell and whistle them Twitter gave the developers the biggest gift of all – a full working API. In keeping their web interface as simple as possible in order to encourage new users (some will say a little too simple) and providing the API as soon as they did they gave developers a chance to build on to the service and add those bells and whistles. They built a community; which they are currently in danger of alienating, that enriched the user experience IF the users wanted it.

Dave Winer on the other hand wants to change all that – he wants to remake Twitter in his image.

In his post Dave provides us with his wish list of what he wants to see changed with Twitter and these wishes go something like this

0. It starts as an exact Twitter clone. Command for command. Then see item #2. I get to completely redesign the UI.

– this one I don’t have much of a problem with except for the redesign part because this is where we start to go off into fantasy land

1. I want to start my own Twitter, for free. You host it for me. Anyone can join.

– then this isn’t Twitter. This is your creation but one that you don’t want any responsibility for the costs of running. How magnanimous of you.

2. I have to be able to edit the template, fully, so I can make it look like my blog. This will allow designers, for the first time, to tinker with the look and feel of a Twitter. They played a big role in the blogging bootstrap, but have mostly been sidelined by the emergence of Twitter.

– I guess this would also include removing the Twitter logo and replacing it with the same one from your blog. Excuse me but whose company and service is this? This would be like taking a bottle of Pepsi and slapping a “Uncle Dave’s Sodie Pop” label on it.

3. I want to map my domain to it, so it’s part of scripting.com.

– again we have this idea of Twitter absorbing the costs of you having your own branded version of the service – and for free. Ya that makes a lot of business sense for a company that already isn’t making hardly any money.

4. It’s gotta be fast!

– hmm … here’s a hint – Use Twitter.

5. Lots of prefs that determine who can join, what they can do, various editorial roles. If you used Manila, I want to be able to delegate to managing editors and contributing editors.

– excuse me? What happen to simple? this idea obviously is coming from a mind that hasn’t grasped the fact that Twitter isn’t in business for him. they are after the masses – the ones who came because it was a simple way to broadcast their thoughts and maybe do a bit of name dropping. They didn’t come looking for some new style of blogging which this is. They came for a 140 characters not to be editors of them.

6. Easy hooks into Disqus (and competitors) so each tweet can be the beginning of a conversation.

– please … let’s get serious for a minute. Twitter isn’t, hasn’t been and never will be about having conversations no matter how hard you try to warp it into doing so.

8. The ability to attach a picture, movie, MP3 or any arbitrary data to a tweet, basically the same power as the RSS 2.0 enclosure element.

– that got Pownce and Jaiku pretty far didn’t it. The fact is there is a rich third party ecosphere that has built up around Twitter that provides a lot of that functionality so why should Twitter incur the added infrastructure costs. Once again this takes Twitter beyond the simplicity that has been its strongest drawing card.

9. Full data portability. I’ve got to be able to run a script on my desktop every night to get a complete XML-based backup of my community.

– huh? who other than Dave would actually want to be able to do this on a nightly basis – please raise your hands. Sure I can see having some way to backup your Twitter stream but this is just being nitpicky.

Whether or not as Dave points out a time will come when a subset of Twitter users will desire more than just the plain 140 characters is moot. The fact is that because of the rich developer community that has risen around Twitter just about everything imaginable that can be done with the service will find a way to be done.

What Dave wants though by his wish list is to mimic, complicate and benefit from the Twitter infrastructure without any cost to himself. Tell you what Dave why don’t you grab the open source to Jaiku that is on Google’s AppEngine and have a go. Then get back to us when you’re ready to push Twitter to the wayside.

All this said there is one very important thing that could see the demise of Twitter. Through much of Twitter’s time there has almost seem to be a love hate relationship with developers. From the throttling of the API calls in the early days because they couldn’t keep the service running through to the recent incident of limiting the number of Follower calls per day Twitter has kept developers on edge. They also don’t communicate well with the developers as witnessed by this recent Followers incident that apparently was in place for three days before they told developers about it.

As I pointed out in an earlier post you can only push developers so far before they will just throw up their hands and say enough is enough. The real threat to Twitter isn’t from ideas like Dave’s but from Twitter themselves. All it would take is a couple of developers with the smarts to understand the principals that has driven Twitter’s success and then build the most robust API possible. Once built put the call out to the developers to have at it.

Build the infrastructure that will be able to handle everything that developers can throw at it both now and in the future. Then make the default user front end Twitter simple.

That is the danger to Twitter – not playing host to Dave’s Twitter-alike Knock-off.