Twitter and Constraints

I was inspired by Evan Williams talk at Web2Summit yesterday to start twittering again. I even updated my account and added the Facebook application. The thing is... I was really using the "status" bar in Facebook as my Twitter for the last 6 months. So I'm not sure I really need both.

Evan posited the question, what can you take away to create a "new" or "better" product? The argument being that constraints create value. I was reminded of the cartoonist Gary Larson mentioning that he wasn't a good artist when he started drawing the Far Side, but that the constraint of a single panel forced him to learn how to draw in perspective and that constraint was the best drawing teacher he ever had.

In that vein, putting constraints on a product, particularly one that has a significant user generated content component can be highly useful. In the Twitter case, they were constrained in microblogging by the limit of SMS message lengths of 128 to 160 characters. It has forced users to learn how to be extremely concise (and to use TinyURL ).

His other examples of constraints helping a product were:

1. Fotolog - photosharing like Flickr, but limited to 1 photo per day. Users value a limited resource more and put up only higher quality photos, they comment on photos more, they are more likely to see a greater proportion of the photos.
2. Facebook - before it opened up, you needed to have a college email address to sign up. The constraints forced users to link mostly to people they actually knew and established a beachhead within an existing offline social graph.
3. YouTube - had a filesize limit that encouraged short form video that allowed it to be consumed immediately on the site. Podcasts could probably use some of that constraint. Who has time to listen to a 45 min audio file.

It's an interesting exercise. I'm going back through my client list and thinking about which of their products can benefit from constraints. 

tags: web2summit  product  design