Introduction

Twitter. From the beginning, it’s had stability problems. Now that it’s popular, it’s gotten worse. We’ve all been talking about Twitter replacements, and I was going to post my own ideas here too. But there is a problem with a lot of the Twitter replacement ideas floating around. These ideas are too complex. You use a simple user interface, whether an API application or Twitter’s website, to post simple messages. If you add more features, you make it more complex to post tweets. Below are several ideas that I have had and have seen other people suggest. Below each idea is why it’s too complex.

Twitter ideas

Idea: Make it like Wordpress, where you can either use it on their servers, or install it on your own servers.

Why it’s too complex: Suddenly, you have the problems of supporting dozens of possible server configurations. Developers would have to read bug reports and then have to fix those in a new version or patch. Users would have to download new versions and apply the patch.

You also have to worry about security. If you’ve been paying attention to Wordpress lately, there have been a lot of blogs getting hacked. I bet some of the blogs getting hacked were not at the latest version of Wordpress.

Idea: Allow image uploading and embedding of Youtube videos

Why it’s too complex: This one has a third party implementation, created by Brian Shaler. It’s called Twixxer. The idea is not too bad, but you just have to worry about it’s implementation. The point of microblogging is sorta defeated if you have users uploading twelve images per message.

Idea: Add the ability to embed plugins in Twitter

Why it’s too complex: The basic idea of making an application extensible is to add functionality, which adds complexity.

Idea: Add threaded conversations

Why it’s too complex: Threading makes conversations easier to follow, but you add complexity to the user interface. You might reply to the wrong comment, etc.

Conclusion

Those that try to build services to replace Twitter will attempt to learn from Twitter’s mistakes. What those Twitter-replacers have to watch out for are the mistakes that Twitter didn’t make.