The natural inclination right now for geeks of a certain type is to start dreaming up new standards bodies, or how they can participate in the Open Web Foundation to make a Super Awesome Twitter API Evolution Committee. Here’s my recommendation: Don’t. Don’t do any of that shit, and don’t run off to make membership badges for the Treehouse Club quite yet. Instead, just iterate and ship.
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buzz posted this
This zeros in on what I believe is probably the major reason for Twitter’s success: the rule of least power, or its informal cousin “Worse is Better”.
If, for example, you convened a standards body of experts to design an infrastructure to handle all of the world’s electronic commerce, what you would have ended up with would almost certainly be very different from HTTP, the protocol we have today. It would probably boast many more features, have some more obvious provision for state maintenance, and have a high degree of security baked in. But instead, when you purchase a book from Amazon.com, you do so using a bare bones, 20 year old protocol that has been creatively adapted for the purpose. Why? Because HTTP is simple, and thus is widely implemented and applicable to a wide variety of scenarios its creators could never have anticipated.
I think the Twitter API has succeeded where ostensibly better-suited technologies (such as RSS and Atom) have failed, for precisely the same reasons. It has grown very organically over time, and thus has its quirks, shortcomings, and aesthetic warts but it’s simple enough for even the most casual programmers to work with. It sets aside many of the Byzantine concerns that have bogged down other syndication technologies, and strips the API for accessing a stream of content to its simplest core. And it’s here, now. Like Dash, I think it has a bright future—as long as its future stewards remember what made it successful in the first place.