The Gong Show

I fascinated by the evolution of the “@___” functionality in Twitter.

When people started using Twitter they saw similarities between the a thread of Tweets and a thread of comments. In a thread of comments, a convention emerged over time that the way to reference “foobar’s” comment in your comment is to write “@foobar”. So, this convention emerged in to Twitter community as well. Initially, Twitter didn’t realize that this would be the way to reference other people’s tweets, so “@foobar” was text and nothing more.

Then Twitter enhanced the “@foobar” functionality by embracing the emergent use of this convention by making the “@foobar” be a hyperlink to foobar’s most recent tweet. The dev team at Twitter saw how the community was using their product in unintended ways and embraced the community’s decision be reenforcing the emergent convention with additional functional.

This story is a great example of the power of the iterative design process. Build a feature, release early, see how your users actually use your feature, rebuild or add functionality in response to the observed usage, release again (early), repeat. This process is crucial to the success of any web service.

This story is also a great example of the power of emergence in feature requests. The “@foobar” feature bubbled up from the community; it was not a top-down directive by a product manager at Twitter. Many of the great features in my favorite products bubbled-up from third-party hackers through the community, such as:

• Geotagging in Flickr: There were a number of third-party tools to geotag photos in Flickr via the API before Flickr release their excellent first-party implementation.
• Tags on MBL: One of my favorite MyBlogLog features is the ability to tag someone else’s profile page publicly for all to see. It adds rich metadata, and even makes for a fun rudimentary message system ;) However, MBLTagger, a third-party mashup predated and predicted MBL tagging functionality. In some ways, I liked the MBLTagger functionality even better than the first-party implementation because it extended tags out the MBL faceroll widget too.
• WordPress Autosave: There may be multiple sources of inspiration for WordPress Autosave… however, prior to WordPress implementing a first-party auto save feature. I was using a GreaseMonkey script called Textarea Backup. It was crucial! Saved your work in textfields online every 10 keystrokes. I still use Textarea Backup in MovableType.

As major web properties continue to open up in deep, meaningful ways (first Facebook, then LinkedIn, now MySpace) I think emergent functionality is going to become an even richer vein of impressive functionality than before. For example, had Flickr been as integrally open as Facebook, there would have been no need for Flickr to re-implement geotagging of photos after a third-party had already put together a good implementation. But, Flickr’s API was too superficial, so no matter how good a third-party implementation of geotagging photos turned out to be, it was never integrated enough to hit mainstream usage in the Flickr community. Well, that’s all changing now as APIs allow for deeper integration (everyone copying Facebook). And, so I’m really excited to see the features that are developed as a result.