There's an old well-worn addage that says, "The customer is always right." On the surface, it means that you should always strive to provide good customer service. But on a deeper level, it means that if your customers do things with your service that you never intended, perhaps you should just go with it. That's likely what happened with Twitter, which started out as a place to report the random little happenings in your life, and has begun to evolve into a platform for serious discussion and breaking news.
When Twitter was first launched in July 2006 (as Twittr), it was described as "present tense blogging," a service "that helps groups of friends bounce random thoughts around with SMS." Even today on Twitter, the company's suggested use cases all revolve around mundane status updates. But somewhere along the way, Twitter was embraced by bloggers and citizen journalists, politicians and businesses, as a way to report, react to, and discuss news items.
We talked about why Twitter works so well for news in a piece here last month. We predicted that Twitter "will become an increasingly more important point for the distribution of breaking news during 2008, to the extent that traditional journalists will begin to pay more and more attention to it the way they have to blogs." It is perhaps Twitter's openness to letting customers define it that has led to its success.
I used to work in the computer game industry, which is known for letting customers define new use cases for their products. Computer game developers often provide tools for users to create modifications to their games that take them in new and unexplored directions. In recent years, many games have begun to be created with non-linear, open ended designs that let users progress through the game in ways that even the developers didn't intend.
"Computer gaming is supposedly all about interactivity, but typically we put players on rails and say, 'Okay, wiseguy, figure out what I want you to do here!'" said game designer Warren Spector in 2000. He succeeded in making his seminal shooter "Deus Ex" break out of that convention by creating a game that was so open ended that there were always multiple ways to achieve a level objective -- some that Spector himself never thought of until he saw players doing it.
In a way, computer game modifications are analogous to the mashup movement on the Internet. By providing users with open APIs, web app creators are letting their customers take their applications in directions that they likely didn't think of. It is not that developer should always listen to everything users demand of their apps -- you have to find the right customers -- but providing open access to your product's architecture and data and letting users remix it can yield mashups that turn your app into a killer app.
Google Maps, for example, is supremely useful on its own. But what truly makes it and other mapping services like it killer, is the ability for people to utilize and remix that data in third party products. Google's Maps API has been used in thousands of mashups, many of them are obvious, but I'm willing to bet when the company first started making the product they didn't think it would be used as the basis of a racing game or used to estimate cab fare.
And though there is certainly still a place for Twitter's original use case, and there are people who use the service that way, it is the ecosystem of corollary applications and users who have taken the service in completely unexpected directions that have made Twitter so special.
As a side note, interestingly, this article evolved in unexpected ways much like the services I was writing about. Its original title was "Getting Back to Twitter's Roots," and started out as a riff on the New York Times article I linked to in the last paragraph.
Comments
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Interesting article. There are definitely some valid points here in regards to accepting and embracing user feedback, which all companies should do, but to let them "define" the product is a mission fraught with disaster. UNLESS, of course, you have little specific vision of a final product on your own.
Fundamentally good products are not supposed to have generic appeal to all audiences. Furthermore, many users will identify features that sound good conceptually, but don't work well in implementation. Also, the extent of this concept is really limited to specific types of platforms, and doesn't apply to many many types of software, products, or services.
At the end of the day, I'll return to my original point: the *BEST* products are built by people with a passion and a vision for a specific type of outcome. The best of these people will naturally embrace their customers feedback, but will also not accept it blindly. They will take elements, shape them into concepts, and constantly improve their products.
Remember - committees build camels, not horses.
Posted by: Jeremy Toeman | February 14, 2008 10:46 PMMicroformats like twitter useful in games there teams of players need to play,think,and act fast and synchronously
Posted by: Scabr | February 15, 2008 12:24 AMFor the most part this works. By watching what users do it can help you to build a better application. I think though that many developers, owners of sites such as twitter, digg, etc. do not get involved enough to see usage patterns (especially the ones weren't meant to happen).
I've seen first hand on several social sites where the staff gets involved and great things begin to happen. I imagine it would be the same in the game industry, maybe even more so.
Posted by: Allen Harkleroad | February 15, 2008 2:25 AMSo much time is spent by founders thinking about why users are going to use their service. "What's the value proposition?" is the MBA-speak for this. Powerpoints are generated to explain this value to bored investors. And yet, the best new Web applications don't have one set in stone, or at least they let the users determine how they're going to use it. If your app had real value you'd have built and released it yourself by now. You'd need it so bad yourself you'd have to freaking invent it.
We are still in the early days of the Internet. We are like the DIGITAL MASONS. We are building the infrastructure for future generations. The brand that provides the most flexible usage set - one that FUTURE GENERATIONS will be using, you can just TELL - is the brand to bet on.
- srini
Posted by: srini kumar | February 15, 2008 3:44 AMmetanotes.com
Josh
This is a good point to make and is as important to the world of hardware development as it is to software and web development. The way Seesmic is getting input is a great example.
Companies can't let users define their vision, though.
Look at the leaps that Apple has made in the last few years - pushing USB, introducing universal wireless support, killing off the floppy, introducing the iPhone, phasing out DVDs, the MacBook Air; all of these have required the vision to give people something wonderful, without giving people some things that they wanted.
Posted by: James Lewin | February 15, 2008 5:37 AMImagine if using productivity software at work was enjoyable and people-focused.
We do.
Enjoyable means we're all using it. Once we're all using it we can be productive. And giving people/companies the flexibility to modify it so that it matches their needs is key.
Posted by: Sam Lawrence | February 15, 2008 6:29 AMAny ideas on how to locate different uses?
Posted by: Adam | February 15, 2008 8:58 AMGood post! We wrote about something similar here
Posted by: Jens | February 15, 2008 11:03 AMI agree that your users will ultimately define your app, however like other's have mentioned, it's important for you to first have a clear vision of what your app will be like.
Because oftentimes, users will have suggestions that contradict one another. And if you try to implement both, you might end up with something that's more confusing and complicated.
Posted by: Jackson | February 17, 2008 8:37 AMI agree and the I believe the next step will be mashups of mashups, just like Google itself did with the mashup of the mashup TwitterVision's API with Twitter, YouTube and Google News for Super Tuesday: http://maps.google.com/decision2008.
Posted by: Murat Aktihanoglu | February 26, 2008 12:07 PM