Walt Mossberg wrote this Verge article about Twitter becoming too complicated for users, comparing it unfavorably to Facebook.
John Gruber’s response sums this up perfectly:
The fundamental problem is that Twitter is compared to Facebook, and it shouldn’t be. Facebook appeals to billions of people. “Most people”, it’s fair to say. Twitter appeals to hundreds of millions of people. That’s amazing, and there’s tremendous value in that — but it’s no Facebook. Cramming extra features into Twitter will never make it as popular as Facebook — it will only dilute what it is that makes Twitter as popular and useful as it is.
Exactly.
This implies that Walt Mossberg’s criticism is incorrect, and it implies that his criticism doesn’t apply to Facebook. But I don’t think that is the case. In fact, I think his criticism not only applies to Twiiter and Facebook, but also applies to everything in technology. It is all much, much too complicated, and getting more complicated. You can take Walt’s article and rewrite it in 2 minutes, replacing “Twitter” with “iOS” and it is painless to come up with examples of how iOS has become more complicated over the past few years at the expense of users. You can even apply it to “HTML5” which you can only love if you went through the bad old days of HTML4.
The main problem is a complete lack of editorial oversight. Coders are coding to impress other coders, and designers are designing to impress other designers, and nobody has any respect for the user. So Twitter, Facebook, and Apple are each a chorus of mismatched features. It is not possible to grasp any underlying principle because there isn’t any.
So not only are they getting more complicated, but because of their lack of direction, they are too heavily influenced by their loudest users. So the only people who are happy with Twitter are trolls and the only people who are happy with iOS are tech bloggers.
Let’s hope that jack Dorsey can keep Twitter viable without junking it up with “friends” and other such nonsense. Twitter is the only social network I like because it maintains some dignity in the face of relentless social networking.
In Facebook’s regard, I would make the case that it’s in Facebook’s interests to confound usability as much as possible, in order to keep as many account holders vulnerable to advertising and distraction (and therefore generating more revenue) as possible. Note how often FB changes user-privacy configuration details.