Newspapers can learn from Twitter's simplicity
Entry updated Feb. 12, 2008 at 4:32 p.m.
Newspapers can learn a lot from the micro-blogging Web site Twitter. The dead-simple service proves that sometimes a product's usefulness becomes more apparant as you take features away.
And we all know how difficult most newspaper Web sites can be to use. Their horrible search, bloated navigation and overwhelming amount of information takes the shock-and-awe approach to Web design.
Twitter, on the other hand, doesn't even require that you visit the Web site to send and receive information. If you do visit the site, and don't know immediately what to do, then you probably have no place using the Internet.
Speaking to the crowd at the Web 2.0 Summit, Twitter and Blogger founder Evan Williams said the service was originally conceived for SMS, which only acceptes 140 characters. And because of this simplicity, Twitter requires a "a low cognitive load" that makes use of the service very appealing.
I also love that Williams didn't put titles for Twitter posts because of the hesitation most users had when writing blog entry titles:
He [Williams] mentioned that when Blogger was being developed, the tool originally didn't have a title field for posts. When he finally added a title field, he found that he would hesitate whenever he sat down to write a blog post. Because of that extra feature, the service got harder to use.
Twitter is so simple in fact, that explaining it to a non-user can be difficult. (Those of you that have tried know what I mean.)
Newspaper Web sites share similarities with Twitter in that they seek and distribute information in a rapid timeframe.
What if newspapers made it so users never had to visit their sites in order interact with that information?
Achieving this goal would take a paradigm shift. APIs would need to be released. Developers would need to be courted (see Facebook Developer Platform). Advertising would need rethinking.
Many RSS users, myself included, are already traveling away from the task of visiting sites to get blog entries, stories and other information. We aren't seeing the hours-worth of work put into multimedia projects or special sections.
How can we rethink the newspapers' purpose so that it operates free from the confines of any platform?
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