Twitter’s Evan Williams: Create Something New By Taking Things Away
The title of Evan Williams’ talk at the Web 2.0 Summit was "Think Less."
He says it was the mantra he employed when dreaming up his Twitter micro-blogging service. In Evan’s short presentation (all slides and ideas, no announcements — quite refreshing), he argued that a product’s usefulness often becomes more apparent as you take features away.
Twitter was originally designed for SMS, which is extremely limited — 140 characters of text, no images. Because of that simplicity, it requires "a low cognitive load," and therefore, people gravitate to it more naturally. After using complicated apps with toolbars and dozens of features, it’s refreshing to use a tool that’s nothing but a text box.
Twitter’s SMS roots still run deep.
"A lot of people never even go to the website," Williams said, adding that the original Twitter users still prefer to receive all of their updates over SMS. "Also, a lot of people just use a desktop client or some other tiny app to update their status. Those people don’t visit the website either."
Imposing limits on his applications’ design is standard practice for Williams now, but it wasn’t always the case.
"In the six years I was working at Blogger," he said, recalling his days as the blogging service’s founder, "I spent all of my time trying to add things to it."
He mentioned that when Blogger was being developed, the tool originally didn’t have a title field for posts. When he finally added a title field, he found that he would hesitate whenever he sat down to write a blog post. Because of that extra feature, the service got harder to use.
By contrast, Twitter’s simplicity lets you write with no hesitation.
As an example of the way simplicity makes web services better, Evan also talked about Fotolog. The photo sharing service, a Flickr competitor, originally limited user photo uploads to one per day, ostensibly for scaling reasons. The limit had an unexpected positive impact on the service: people looked at each other’s photos more. And they left more comments for each other, which helped build the community.
