Great interview with Clay Shirky in the Wall Street Journal. Shirky makes a particularly interesting comment about social software:
It’s almost universally the case with social software that the software that launches with the fewest features is the stuff that takes off. The shift is from thinking about the computer as a box to thinking of the computer as a door, and nobody wants a door with 37 handles. Twitter has six features, and it launched with only one. A brutally simple mental model of the software that’s shared by all users turns out to be a better predictor of adoption and value than a completely crazy collection of features that ends up being slightly different for every user.
Empirically, Shirky seems to be right. Email, Facebook, Usenet, Twitter, wikis, Blogger, Flickr, Friendster, del.icio.us – all were incredibly simple when they launched. They certainly had a “brutally simple mental model of the software that’s shared by all users”.
But I’m not sure I believe this is true, and I certainly don’t know why it’s true, if it is.
Maybe a partial explanation is that having a simple shared mental model makes network effects much more powerful. When we think about social software as a user, we don’t just think about the software, we also think about the network of other users, and it’s important to be confident that we have a shared understanding with those other users. If we’re not confident of that shared understanding, we won’t connect, and the value of the software will diminish.
Update: In comments, Clay Shirky replies:
“If we’re not confident of that shared understanding, we won’t connect, and the value of the software will diminish.â€
I don’t think this is a partial explanation. I think this is *the* explanation. Given the competition all social software has, a simple and shared mental model is essential to elevating the eventual leaders over the competition.
The simple apps inspire people, get them excited, and have a practical use. They likely fall within the light side 80/20 with regards to practicality — closer to covering the 70% use case. People fall in love with the simple utility and then come to rely on it as the developers knock away at some useful features to hit the 80% of folks.
Jesse – All of what you say is also true of desktop software, yet desktop software usually launches with far more features than social software. So I don’t think your explanation can be complete.
Desktop software and web based software has totally different expectations. People expect to get a more feature rich experience when they install something over something that just lives in a tab on their web browser. Plus with desktop software, getting people to update with the new features isn’t all that easy unless you force the updates. Even then you won’t get a 100% roll out. On the web, updating 100% of the users is far easier.
“If we’re not confident of that shared understanding, we won’t connect, and the value of the software will diminish.”
I don’t think this is a partial explanation. I think this is *the* explanation. Given the competition all social software has, a simple and shared mental model is essential to elevating the eventual leaders over the competition.
Most probably its because the barriers to adoption/learning curve for the average person is significantly lower.
This also may explain why gaming systems like the Wii and the Nintendo DS are able to take off, in spite of there being other systems with much better graphics.
Its the ease of use that drives adoption.
Bengers: I don’t believe this, for the same reason I disagree with Jesse Rodgers, above. Your explanation would lead one to believe that only extremely simple desktop software would take off. Yet that’s demonstrably not the case.