![]() ![]() Rather than roll out new features to everyone while it waits for the inevitable backlash, Google makes them opt-in only, through Labs. If you must add new features, I think a much better approach is the one Gmail recently began taking with Gmail Labs. And Microsoft makes it worse by offering a bunch of variations of a similar product where it’s not really clear what the real differences are. New features placate some users, but ultimately, that cycle is a losing proposition. Instead, Microsoft is stuck in the cycle of adding new features to a product that is pretty much the same as it’s been for at least a decade, if not longer. We saw this happen a bit with some core changes in Vista - though, to be fair, Vista’s performance I think hurt it more than anything else. Microsoft simply cannot fundamentally change it too much - even though plenty of people would argue that it probably should - because people would go wild. On a much larger scale, I’d argue that it’s the same trap Windows falls into. Not surprisingly, that pisses people off. These changes require more work be put in to learning the system again, and that takes away from Facebook’s core value: Using its network to find information about your friends. It really is pretty hard to master using Facebook, and a lot of users (and developers) have put a lot of time into just that, only to have the rug pulled out from under them with some fundamental changes. I’d argue that’s one reason why we see so much backlash when Facebook makes design tweaks nowadays. And, in turn, an explosion in complexity. ![]() But with an explosion in growth, came an explosion in features. The number one reason I started using Facebook rather than MySpace several years ago is that it was so much neater, cleaner - yes, simpler. And Twitter, the little service that everyone was calling silly just a couple years ago, is now clearly having a direct effect on huge web services - like Facebook. That, in turn, has led to an entire ecosystem of third party applications that now run on top of it. Yet Twitter (yes, perhaps aided by the fact that it lacked the spare engineers in the early days during its constant crashes), stayed the course and kept its product extremely simple. How many calls have there been to add this feature, or add that one? We’ve all done it. Those people aren’t necessarily wrong, but even they must admit that it has done one thing very right: Keeping the service simple. Since its inception, some people have been saying Twitter is silly. Messages to other users, links to interesting articles, disaster reports - these all go way beyond simply saying what you are doing, but they still work within the parameters set by the creators. ![]() But it quickly evolved well beyond that - into something that the creators never intended. It started out as a service meant to share what you are doing in 140 characters or less. Because it’s not like a lack of decisions has to be limiting. It may be blasphemy to say that users want to be told what to do, but at the very least, they want to be lead in a direction.Īnd that’s important. And further, users are often bad decision makers. On the face of it, it makes sense to give users a lot of options when it comes to features, and let them decide what to use and what not to use. And I would suggest, often fail as a direct result of that. Way too many new products and services are too complicated. A lot of them seem to want to do a million different things because other companies have been successful at one of those things in the past. It’s a mantra that always pops into my head when I’m looking at new startups. ![]()
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