Its been a while since i took the time and watch some inspirational TED presentations. And last time I viewed the latest presentations one found my interest. Simply one word, Twitter spoke to me.
Twitter, a relative young service that created the expression Micro-blogging. Looking at the popularity of text messaging on cellphones and combined it with the blog technology, spawned a service and phenomenon now wildly adapted by many many people. I would like to see any numbers on how many Twitter accounts exist. Many view it as the next evolution or extension of regular blogs. And there are a big variety of different microblog services now. But Twitter is by far the biggest.
The speech by internet entrepreneur Evan Williams, one of the Twitter creators some points really struck me. He mention how Twitter have evolved and the users have found new ways to use the service than the creators ever though of. And I think one of the key for the success is how simple and open the service is. Twitter is very open for users to develop new services outside of the original platform. With an easy to use API, the users and fans get great tools to build new applications. Open API for new services becomes more and more important. Developers today are used to have access to great APIs for them to use their imagination.
This isn’t anything new. Facebook have received much attention from developers, companies and users for all the Application available. And I believe this will be even more important in the future, not to develop a complete service, but rather build the groundwork and then let the users develop it further. Maybe, not even have a clear image of that the service should be used for. Let the users decide what is should be used for or how. Its been showed time and time again, that users can come up with new ideas for a product, service or brand that the owner or creator never had in mind. But often (still) do the owner or creator hesitate to take advantage of those ideas and are very quick to send out their “assassins”, their lawyers.
Twitters openness are totally in line with the principle of the web, easy, accessible and open! Lets just hope more new services follow the same concept. But, in all cases the first thing is to have a killer app that people love and want to help develop further.