So Twitter took away the Favorites star and replaced it with a Likes heart. This tells us many things. And most of them are bad.
The Arrogance of the Wrong Management
A company may initially provide a Social Media service to users, but it is the users themselves who shape that Social Media platform's ethos and culture. They take it, and organically use the features provided to create interesting communities and unexpected usages of the software. And people like the platform. And the number of users grows. And the service is a success.
Thus it was with Twitter.
Then there is an IPO and the initial geekiness that drove the platform's creation is lost in a haze of quarterly reports and stock price expectations. And you bring in management who supposedly know how to run publicly traded companies and they fuck up what differentiated the service and made it special.
How? Via late night brainstorming sessions and workshops to come up with exciting ways to keep the platform "relevant" and "buzzing" And what ideas and innovations do such corporate-driven events tell you to do?
They tell you: Copy Facebook. Remove the favorites star and replace it with a "likes" heart. FB has likes, we should have "likes" too.
And a feature is wiped out and morphed into something no user ever requested and no user ever wanted.
Innovation is not driven by copying. It is driven by addition.
But, after an IPO and putting the Wrong Management in charge, the safe bet, the copying of features, becomes the order of the day. And a pseudo-stability of the share price is maintained by timidity. But bonuses all round! That's what counts right?
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The Mediocrity of Unnecessary Changes
So the changes come in on the platform, and your millions of pretty contented users collectively shout "Why?" and "What are you doing?" and "That was working fine you stupid idiots!".
There is a direct relationship between tinkering with changes no-one asked for and pissing off your users to the point of their leaving you.
This tinkering with software is now what laughingly passes as development. Companies are not developing anything. That is all done before the IPO. What they are doing is very little, changing interfaces and pissing off users.
And this mediocrity of unnecessary changes plagues once innovative outfits that are now treading water and saying "innovation" but no longer doing anything innovative.
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Agile Software Development
And my biggest bugaboo that allows unnecessary tinkering on the edges of your product? Tinkering that produces maximum anger in your users? Agile Development! Fixed in the next build. New app! New app! New app! This methodology of software development is a recipe for bad software. Heck, updates come out so regularly from some companies they are actually screaming "We make unreliable stuff!" to anyone who cares to listen.
And now, users have to take some blame. Because they don't complain about poor software quality because they have now an almost Pavlovian acceptance of bad products and services when they hear "Fixed in the next build".
You know what? IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN RIGHT IN THE FIRST BUILD.
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Please Twitter do not go down this road. Yahoo! went there and you know how successful that was.
