More is not better
Ugh. Twitter’s new “Who to Follow” feature was irksome when it magically arrived a couple of months ago. Now there is “The new Twitter!” and it seems official to say that we have arrived at at time in technological innovation where “efficiency” and the all-in-one product are the features du jour and this is not a good thing. I understand: having your iPhone and iPod combined to sync with your computer and the web = makes perfect sense. However, this angle does not work for everything and most certainly should not be implemented on a platform who’s big brag from day one has been compactness and elegant simplicity, a platform that singularly brought back the importance of the anecdote and headline in a time when print media is nose-diving.
Why Twitter? Why must you insist on following Facebook’s lead? Do you have nothing better to do than provide more and more clutter simply because a similar platform, though not really a competitor in terms of service, is making more idle and seemingly useless updates to their interface? One of the main complaints from people worldwide is the fact that we are constantly bombarded by advertisements and media clutter!
More is NOT better. More is more reason for me to drop you as a service. More is more reason for me to, as Dexter Morgan would say, make you disappear from my life. I used to use Twitter because I liked it’s single-faceted interface and navigation. I do not need MORE.
Dear Twitter,
Everything about you is angled towards simple, efficient minimalism -from 140 characters to the lists feature to the nifty little “retweet” icon that you created. Why do you insist on borrowing clutter from Facebook? Not only have you littered my sidebar with the new “Who to Follow” feature, but you have killed, on some fundamental level, the very organic way in which I like to find new information (or followees, if you will). There is a certain amount of fun in raiding someone else’s feed for clever anecdotes or interesting links, which ultimately might lead me to follow someone new. I like Twitter because it’s streamlined and for the most part, I only have to see the information that I have chosen to see (i.e. from the people I personally have handpicked to follow). Twitter, you are not a social network. You are an information exchange network. Why must you change your mind and add to the information overload that your users didn’t have to be subjected to prior to this new feature?
Please change it back… or at least add a “Hide” function so that we don’t have to look at it if we don’t want to.
