Fewer Features By Design - Twitter and Snapchat are Negative Space
Fewer featured products can dominate competition. The appeal of new features is a siren's song that leads development teams to "shipped"-wreck. Implementing fewer features can reduce development costs and reduce complexity that makes fine tuning more difficult. By designing systems with heavy constraints and/or "missing" features, the negative space often produces emergent qualities. Here, negative space refers to images that depict meaningful shapes by outlining through the absence of paint. This post offers two examples of negative space features.
One measure of a software's success is it's popularity. Twitter and Snapchat are popular platforms that prior to success would have seemed, and perhaps still do, quixotic. While it is easier to say why these platforms have advantages now that they are popular, it would not have been as easy in 2005. If a researcher presented Twitter as an untested idea, it would not have been well received because it does not use novel features and would not have appeared to be useful.
Twitter is a fewer featured Facebook. In 2005, Facebook could do all of the things Twitter did. People could type even more than 140 characters at a time and keep up with friends. Twitter excised bidirectional links (friends) in favor of directional links (followers) and limited posts to text with 140 characters or fewer. Despite these limitations, people flocked to use it. Because of SMS, Twitter provided a way to communicate from anywhere. The smaller messages were often preferred over verbose postings which could be seen on Facebook. Why? One can read them more quickly and it forces people to be succinct.
Snapchat is a fewer featured Instagram. Instagram lets people send photos to friends and even keeps the pictures so they can be viewed again. Email easily affords sending images to friends directly. Snapchat excised persistence. Images from Snapchat are not archived or saved. The recipient may only see the pictures once and then they are gone forever, at least in theory. However, this ephemerality affords a feeling of safety. While on Instagram and Facebook, the a photo may offend or discredit a person now or ten years in the future, a single use image does not have the same threat.
These examples are curious. Perhaps the next innovation in social media will a new manifestation of an old platform that removes or constrains existing features.