Sunday, October 25, 2009
Tweet Tweet!
Ahhh.. the mysteries of design, of function, of reason, of life!
Twitter. Does this fall within my bloggable category of design? The curious reader may ask so. Twitter, the social networking website, does indeed fall under a gamut of categories and labels.
It is, fundamentally, a website. But a website not only with a specific visual design, but a website with even more specific user design.
Unlike Facebook (where new gadgets and games and gizmos are added daily), Twitter aims to keep things simple. They limit your character count to 140. No paragraph quotations or intense and gruesome musings on life. The layout seems decidedly permanent. A news feed of the most current tweets from your tweethearts, a limited box for response and randomness, the ability to see all tweets from a single user. It would seem that in comparison to Facebook's plethora of capabilites, Twitter would fail almost instantly.
The creators of Twitter, however, take advantage of one of the fail-proof principles of design: simplicity.
There is a danger, as any user of Facebook would know, of over promoting yourself. I believe it is the fundamental desire of humans to be heard, to have the sensation that they are being "followed" in the Twitter sense.
Users of both Facebook and Twitter thrive on the feeling that someone is reading their tweets/status updates and that someone is finding interest in their lives.
There is always that fear, however, that overdoing it will expose your desire for attention.
The 140 character limit and the simple layout of Twitter seems to trick the user into believing that it is the happy medium between getting attention and seeming like you don't want attention at all.
Twitter thrives on this quiet desire, and as such stands as a fantastic example for simple and effective design.
11:22 PM by jamie.