Disappearing Software
Twitter’s enormous usage spike during SXSW was definitely felt back in the Bay Area, where I noticed the spike in mentions of Twitter in my RSS feeds, created my own Twitter account, and heard friends and colleagues discussing similar experiences. Though their gratuitous use of AJAX makes the site a bit painful to use while it is having growing pains (lots of unanswered XMLHttpRequests), overall I dig the Twitter aesthetic of minimalism with attention to details. It almost seeks to disappear. One detail I particularly like is the way long URLs are automatically fed through TinyURL, to save space in these messages meant for SMS and other forms of low-bandwidth communication.
This got me to thinking that Twitter’s parents are really services like TinyURL, little useful things that you hardly consider websites–just someplace you quickly stop by on the way to something else. Things like YouSendIt, ZShare, WatchThatPage, and of course del.icio.us. (In fact, Twitter is really just del.icio.us with a different attitude, and no requirement that your minutiae have a URL attached.) The best of these sites strive to disappear. The worst try to trap you, keep you dallying about, perhaps looking at ads, for a bit while you wait for a Javascript timer to count down or some such inanity. This may increase profits in the short run at the expense of long-term growth, as the commodity nature of this class of “utility” software means that people will gravitate toward the least annoying service. Twitter succeeds because it is as unobtrusive as possible for software that is all about being as obtrusive as possible.