Dear Twitter,

Got a second?

Almost everybody who folllows my online adventures closely knows I’m a fan of yours. I Tweet up a storm at my own www.twitter.com/harrymccracken feed and there’s also a technologizer one that automatically Tweets every Technologizer story.  When friends tell me they don’t understand you, I evangelize on your behalf. I can’t think of a tech product or service I use every day that I take more pleasure in.

But I’m increasingly concerned about you. Simply put, you seem to be profoundly complacent on multiple fronts. A few examples (all of which plenty of people have pointed out before me)…

–You bought Twitter-search company Summize back in July, but still haven’t deigned to put so much as a link to its impressive search engine in Twitter’s interface–except for the tiny one in your footer–let alone a search field. (You still make us go to search.twitter.com to find this most basic of features.)

–You haven’t added many (any?) of the obvious features that would make Twitter more useful, like the ability to really respond to a specific Tweet.

–You’re letting third-party sites such as Tweetree give Twitter obvious enhancements like embedded pictures and videos and threaded conversation views.

–Speaking of third parties, they’re doing much of the heavy lifting of making Twitter useful, via desktop clients such as Tweetdeck, phone clients such as Tweetie, and services such as TwitPic. Yet you do little or nothing to help your users find any of them.

–You haven’t introduced any money-making features, which leaves your users worried that you haven’t figured out a business model that’ll keep you going strong for years to come.

Much of this reminds me of the history of Palm. In the mid-1990s, it created the first truly usable PDAs. They were so usable in large part because they were so darn simple. And Palm refused to overcomplicate its products, while numerous more-powerful-but-less-simple competitors flopped.

For years, it worked wonderfully well for Palm and its customers–and the company miraculously managed to repeat the strategy successfully when it hopped from PDAs to Treo smartphones.

And then…it stopped working. While Palm was busy not mucking up its OS, other companies solved many of the issues that made their earlier products so unsatisfactory. Folks started to assume that smartphones would have rich, deeply embedded support for stuff like multimedia, which was tough for Palm to offer since its OS’s infrastructure was so antediluvian. In part because of the things it hadn’t done to upgrade its own OS, it was forced to take the soul-crushing step of making Treos that ran Windows.

Little by little, the company that once understood handheld computing better than any other lost its way, and lost much of its customer base. And the iPhone came along and instantly made Treos look archaic–just as the original Palm PDAs did to mid-1990s handhelds like Apple’s Newton and HP’s OmniGo.

For the past few years, Palm has been discovering how hard it is to surge back into a leadership spot once you’ve almost intentionally given up your lead. It’s pinning all its hopes on the Nova operating system that will apparently debut next week at the Consumer Electronics Show.  I remain a Palm fan and have an open mind, so I’m working hard to be optimistic–but I don’t think you’ll find a single Palm-watcher out there who thinks that the most likely scenario involves Nova catapulting Palm back to glory, or who doesn’t think that the company was horribly complacent for far too many years. (Here’s a famous example of tough love…one which I thought about when I sat down to write this letter.)

Did I mention that I used Palm products forever, but moved on a couple of years ago? I felt guilty. I also felt like I had no choice.

I understand that I don’t have a clue what you guys are up to behind closed doors. You may have this all figured out already. I’m not saying that anyone else has it figured out yet–Tweetree, for instance, is a tad clunky, and I’m not proposing that you remodel Twitter to resemble it this very moment. And I understand that no would-be Twitter-killer has done so much as give you a flesh wound yet. (Actually, they seem to be dying off, just as would-be PalmPilot-killers did for years.)

I’m not saying you’re headed for a cliff, and you certainly haven’t driven off one yet. But I’m still worried that you’re too confident in the power of Twitter’s simplicity, too afraid you might mess it up by making changes unless they’re absolutely perfect, and too slow in reacting to the changing world around you. I’m worried, in other words, that you’re turning into Palm.

Anything you might do to help make clear you’re on top of things and intend to keep on improving Twitter forever–while preserving its DNA–would help. (No, reinstating People Search doesn’t count.)

That’s my two cents, anyhow.

Happy new year,

–Harry

 
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