A Simple Idea Like Slicing Bread or Homogenizing Milk.
Before I was born, my grandfather used to own a grocery store. It’s clear that this man whom I admire and love as much as anyone in the world was never destined to become a captain of industry. One day many decades ago someone came into his store with a new product for him to sell to his customers. It was milk. Not just any old milk, but homogenized milk.
“In the old days,” grandpa would tell me. “You had to shake up your milk before you drank it because the cream would separate and rest on top.”
In my entire life, I have yet to see unhomogenized milk, but it’s not that hard to imagine. What did my grandfather do with this brilliant idea? Nothing. He kicked the guy out of the store. Just like he did to the guy selling him Sara Lee cakes (“I thought, who would buy a cake that you put in the freezer instead of a pantry shelf!”) He didn’t really take to change very well, my grandfather. It’s an admirable quality in a man to stick to your principles and it’s somewhat endearing to know he’s much the same man he is now in his 80s as he was when he came home from World War II.
The point of the story is that my grandfather can be as curmudgeonly as most people about shiny new technologies and that prevents us from seeing how a simple idea can be an innovation. When I told that story to my friend once he cried out that my grandfather probably would have kick the guy out of his store who first brought him sliced bread. I don’t doubt it.
Twitter is like homogenized milk or sliced bread.
Facebooks, MySpace, LinkedIn and a host of other application layer on more and more features but it’s Twitter’s idea, which is a refinement and hybridization of two another simple technologies—the blog and the SMS message—that all the others now seem to try to emulate. Think about it. Facebook allows you to connect with people, share photos, videos, music, links to web pages and information about yourself. Isn’t that basically what Twitter does, albeit in a striped down format? Instead of layering on the applications, Twitter is reliant on outside developers in the community to add the features needed like TwitPic and url shorteners all in a brief time frame of a couple of years and in the era of one of the worst financial crises since the Great Depression.
There are some who say this is a weakness. The decentralization of Twitter’s other services like TweetDeck make us reliant on a network of application, offered for free, that may be here today but gone tomorrow. I’d argue that if it’s a good enough idea there will be some other developer ready to step up and offer an alternative that’s just as good or even better. (Referring to 3rd party applications that run on top of Twitter.) A prime example are the many url shortening options out there from bit.ly to ow.ly to tinyurl.com.
In a similar way Facebook already is build upon a bunch of other unrelated but vital technologies to make it feasible. But it uses them in that “homogenized milk” sort of way. A prime example is digital imaging technology for the masses. Without the ability for almost everyone to take and upload images taken on their digital cameras a very big part of Facebook’s usefulness to many of its members goes away. It was only a few short years ago that a digital camera and a scanner were luxuries not staples in every home. Facebook took this and served it up for us in a way that’s 10x easier to distribute and share than other services. Tagging of photos added social networking gold to the process.
I’m actually not sure if MySpace had the ability to tag photos as an option previous to Facebook. I used MySpace briefly at first but quickly moved to Facebook. I do remember putting tags onto photos but I’m not 
sure if it did the personal network tagging in the same way as Facebook’s ubiquitous tagging system.
See it’s the simple ideas that are the best even if you wrap them in a ton of bells and whistles or as we like to call them in the tech community: features.
There is a happy end to this tale. My grandfather eventually left the grocery business and drove for a private airport taxi service for many years until he retired. But don’t even try to tell him the best way to get from the train station in Woodmere to JFK. It’s a losing battle no matter how you slice it. He’s the type of guy who’d be arguing with the GPS system. I can just imagine it now.
GPS system’s sweet female, slightly English voice: “Go three miles and make a left.”
My grandfather in old guy’s Jewish accent: “Ahhh, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”