In Thinking Different, Take a Step Back
The new, people gravitate towards it. The novel, the next big thing. It’s just part of who we are. The first human being to ever see fire, before wanting to control it, probably got burnt by it. Curiosity killed the cat, or rather, set fire to the caveman.
When we see something new, it captivates us in a way that only new can. Without knowing what it does yet, how it affects us, we humans still touch. We can’t help it. This is the power that the unknown has over us. An almost hypnotic urge to explore, learn and feel, regardless of potential peril. It’s a good thing too, because without this drive to explore before fully understanding, the human race would have never reached the stars. And, since we can’t gaze into the future, there’s no one to warn us about the consequences of touching. So we will.
Obsession With Forward Motion
This obsession has never been greater. Technological advancement, from tap-water to electricity, has solved most of our day-to-day concerns, simultaneously impacting the values of the developed world. Hunters and gatherers have been replaced by coders and scientists. So much so that the once derogatory “geek”, has become the new sexy.
Growing up in such a world inadvertently teaches us that new is good, old is bad. The multi-generational discussion about giving up a seat to an elderly person in public transportation only proves that each passing generation gets up less. Perhaps it’s just the iPhone in hand that’s proven to be a distraction to noticing. Indeed, the connected world has its downsides. Technology should have solved many of our problems. That was the promise, anyway. Yet it didn’t. It created new problems to solve and, if one gravitated towards the cynical, simply provided toys for the privileged. With far less real innovation than we in the tech industry would like to admit.
I find myself thinking a lot about innovation lately. It’s a key concept of progress, which actually means going forward. Explore and invent new things to “disrupt” the status quo. But the more I think about it, the more this feels like a one-dimensional view.
Think different. That’s what Jobs said. Most people associate this iconic claim with progress and innovation, forward motion. While I do love that sentence, I don’t look at it from that angle. For me, it’s about imagining something that nobody else is doing and doing just that.
In a culture fueled by technological advancement, the transformation of apps and web services seems like the perfect case for this debate. So let’s use Twitter as our case study. But first, a couple of words on social media.
In addition to new things satisfying their curiosity, people want to be loved. We also crave human interaction. These are the basic instincts that drive social media engagement. Nir Eyal calls piggybacking on these instincts hooks, which is appropriate, but it’s also cheating.
Most social media apps prey on those urges. When you feel lonely, you go to Facebook. They’ll demand attention through notifications and alerts, to get you back into the engagement cycle. New features are added constantly, to show you that something new and get you to interact. And we do. Even those of us who can see through the smoke and mirrors, get back in there just the same. Even across 2013 and 2014, no app earned above-average ratings with less than 9 updates in the year. It’s here, with update 121204234, where we find the perfect intersection for our little debate. Back to Twitter.
For those of you living under a rock big enough to fit people under, Twitter is a news and social networking service where users post and read short 140-character messages called “tweets”. I dug that so I signed up, becoming a user. No needle, even if the upper paragraph does draw the obvious parallel to drug abuse.
Moving on from semi-related trains of thought, the point is that the service I originally signed up for in 2010, isn’t the same service I’m using today. It has evolved, pivoted, added features to impact my personal experience in a negative way. For Twitter, it was that, or death. And it still might be.
Bloatware — A Lack of Diversity
Bloatware is defined as software whose usefulness is reduced because of the excessive disk space and memory it requires. That is the original definition, but I’d like to expand it.
On, April 13, 2010 Twitter announces that it will start allowing for advertising in the form of promoted tweets — “ordinary tweets that businesses and individuals want to highlight to a wider group of users.”
In December 2011 the Connect and Discover tabs are introduced along with a redesigned profile and timeline of Tweets. The site’s layout is compared to that of Facebook.
January 2013 — Twitter acquires a video clip company called Vine that launches (later) and releases Vine as a standalone app that allows users to create and share six-second looping video clips.
November 2014 — Twitter announces “Instant Timeline” — a way to show users who have just created accounts interesting content even before they have followed anybody. The company announces that it will make the timeline more customized, highlighting to a user the most important tweets while they were away.
September 2015 — Twitter expands Buy buttons through partnerships with Bigcommerce, Demandware, and Shopify.
October 2015 — It debuts Twitter Moments, a way for people to get a quick overview of important tweets or chains of tweets that occurred recently.
November 2015 — Twitter replaces the Favorite button with a Like button and the star symbol (used to symbolize favoriting) with a heart symbol.
February 2016 — The app rolls out a change to its feed, making recommended tweets the default option, rather than the reverse chronological format that it had used since launch.
May 2016 — Twitter announces that photos, videos, and the person’s handle will not be counted in the 140 characters.
June 2016 — The company launches tags to location feeds with Foursquare. People can see which tweets are sent from a specific place.
To a user like me, most of this is bloatware:
“Unnecessary features added to apps and web services that negatively affect their ability to stand out in a sea of similarly evolving apps and services.”
There, expanded.
The process described here might not be bad for the apps themselves, or for companies building them, but I’d argue that this particular “let’s add all the features that our competitors have” mentality negatively impacts innovation and betrays the trust of early adopters.
Listen, if early Twitterers wanted another Facebook, we would have just opted for Facebook in the first place. Instead, Twitter was our little news feed, which we could effectively interact over. Experimenting with 1000+ character tweets was not what we wanted. Sure, some of the new features were helpful and welcomed by Twitter veterans, but you had me at hello.
While Facebook was having its annoying pokes and games era, it was Twitter’s simplicity that made it cool and useful. Most of what happened there was organic, not feature based. People were limited by characters, had no video sharing options, but used things like hashtags to fuel engagement, stuff like #FF — and it worked.
The weird thing is that you’re getting this article from a “ gimme the new” type of guy. I like to try new stuff and also understand that businesses need to pivot, make money and impact conversions but if you’re slowly dying out because you can’t find a way to monetize (and it’s been like that for a while now) at least you can die sticking to your guns. Alas, the gross oversimplification of the business aspect in this paragraph prevents any such idealism to take place.
Is There Value Behind the Unchanged?
When we as people get scared, the economy fails, the “new” explodes in our faces, people get back to the old ways. They roll back to the previous working version of themselves. In a way, tradition represents our safe place. The Windows start button.
In IT, I feel like there is no safe place anymore. In the age of connectivity, your apps and services trying harder than ever to make them seem human. “Come chat with us, we’ll be glad to help.” Friendly interfaces, even friendlier messaging, is their way of letting you know they care. In reality, good luck with trying to get a real person on the phone. In reality, social networks are going to roll out new features regardless of consumer feedback, because it’s a business imperative, not necessarily because their users want those features, or want them force fed.
The way any social medium evolves is ultimately, to get more users and monetize them. But how it evolves, impacts the type of users it attracts. This ultimately changes the nature of interactions done over that social network. To me, a lack of innovation is every social medium providing the exact same ways of interaction. Attracting virtually the same audience. Online and offline, the problem remains the same as with globalization, if all our interactions are the same, how do we think different? Where does innovation come from?
Maybe it comes from the idea of a platform going against the “nature” of constant growth and settling for 30 employees or, a fixed number of solid clients so these same people can enjoy a perfect work-life balance. Like Basecamp.
In a world where everything is speeding up to the point of breaking, taking a step back could be a step forward. Maybe you don’t need video. Maybe this time, staying the same means being different.
