the displaced texan

The most important feature for making any technology or service mainstream is its simplicity. The first iMac was elegant in its simplicity, three cords to plug in – the power, the keyboard and the ethernet cable – and you were online. There are other examples of simplicity making technology acceptable by the masses, but you know those.

When I think about the social media arena and the tools that available I look again at simplicity. Facebook is very simple and in its simplicity is a powerful way to connect to friends and family. Twitter is a “whale” of simplicity. In fact, it’s a little too simple which is why I think it has done so well and is seriously on the verge of wide adoption – possibly even corporate adoption.

Plurk is a newcomer that showed promise for me of taking Twitter’s place during the Twitter network outages, but after trying to figure out the sliding timeline, the karma points or how to find people, I was done. Then Twitter was back online. Fail.

FriendFeed is both simple and not. The interface very simple. The power behind FriendFeed, as I’ve come to admire, is the ability for people you do and don’t follow to congregate and have a conversation. It’s like the modern day Forum. I’ve engaged in conversations that inspired my second post “PR vs Social Media” to “What did your parents tell you that ended up becoming true.” In fact, FriendFeed actually was the impetus for me getting back into long-form blogging because so many ideas started to percolate after watching some of the conversations.

Now, here’s where simplicity is tricky. FriendFeed is too simple, but I still feel like it needs more GUI to make it accessible to the masses. The FriendFeed team recently added search, which, “can search over all of your friends’ shared items, an individual person’s items, or search all of FriendFeed.” This makes finding what matters to you most, like your Brand, your band or fans much easier and simpler.

I’ll wrap things up, because of course, I do want to keep things simple.

MC