Twitter, in an attempt to stay online during WWDC, has cut even more features out of their service. One thing that annoyed many Twitter users today was the API request limit had been dropped to ten requests per hour, or one request every six minutes. Now, at the time of this writing, they’ve brought back some features.

The feature drop still raises some interesting questions. How many features can be cut from a service? Technically, all of them. So let’s rephrase our question. How many features can be cut from a service without the users leaving? Well, depends on which features you are cutting out.

Another interesting question is raised by the features being removed for a while. Is a stable, but limited service better than an unstable, but full-featured service? A previous CodingExperiments post, Simplicity is the new flexible, partly answers that question. It states at a service that is easier to use now can be seen better than a full-featured service. As a service that is stable is automatically easier to use than a service that is unstable, we can assume that a stable and limited service is better.

But there’s something wrong with our last assumption. It doesn’t say how limited a service can get? When do you get to the breaking point where users leave your service? Plenty of people would answer, “The breaking point is when the application cannot perform its intended function.” At first glance, this seems true. If you look deeper, you’ll discover a better answer. You see, the community doesn’t always use Twitter in the way that Twitter developers intended it to be used in. The Twitter community has built various little tools, #hashtags being one example. You also have all those Twitter API applications, that were limited by the low API request limit. The best answer to this question is “The breaking point is when the users cannot use the application how they want it.” After all, the customer is always right.

So, how many features can be cut out from a service without the users leaving? Well, it isn’t so much about how many features you can cut out as it is about maintaining a delicate balance between limiting your community’s ability to use your service creatively and being unstable. Now, there is no real perfect balance, so it’s why the best advice is to get it right the first time.