October 17th, 2007
Twitter: Aggressively applying constraints
Evan Williams, founder of Obvious, the company behind Twitter, gave an interesting and Twitter-like (brief) talk about lessons from developing the software. “Aggressively applying constraints can have unexpected benefits,” he said, speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit this afternoon. Twitter is SMS-based and restricts users to 140 characters.
Tantek Celik captured the concept of less is more in this statement, “The usability of an interface is inversely proportional to its cognitive load (keystrokes, clicks, etc.),” which Williams quoted.
Williams threw out some thought balloons. How about a super simple search interface (Google), or videos limited to 10 minutes (YouTube), or a photo site limited to one photo a day (Fotolog), or a MySpace competitor limited to college students (Facebook). He also mentioned ideas such as email limited to 20 messages or a social network limited to ten friends. That sounds like a way to simplify your life…
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
