140 Characters Soon Forgotten?

How simple is too simple?  Does simplicity facilitate usability?  Do we sacrifice effectiveness for usability?  I start to ask myself these questions as I log on to twitter.com with far less frequency as once before.  Will this 140-character revolution continue on its meteoric rise, or will it become a nostalgic web property of the past?

I have long praised Twitter for creating a whole new platform for communication.  The service is no short of revolutionary; however, I cannot help myself thinking that there lacks a degree of depth in the service.  For me, Twitter’s charm has worn off quite a bit.  This is due in part to a number of factors, none more important that these two:

1) Lack of Metadata and/or Metrics

For the most part, micro-blogging comes and goes.  The stream of messages (depending on how many you are following) is gone in a number of seconds/minutes.  A 140-character message, in Twitter’s case, holds almost no long-term value.  This is a direct result of a platform with little to no metadata.  Besides embedding links and maybe hashtags, a tweet loses a great deal of meaning after it’s initially sent.

2) Better Web Alternatives

Two web services, Facebook and FriendFeed, have undoubtadly looked to Twitter for some degree of inspiration.  Both serve a more complete and interactive micro-blogging platform, as compared to Twitter’s current offering.  Most importantly, they are in a much better position to combat the issue of meta-data and the shelf life of a post.

So, I’ll ask the questions I posed earlier in the post:

How simple is too simple? — Does simplicity facilitate usability? — Do we sacrifice effectiveness for usability?

Twitter is in danger of being replaced by more robust web services.  Simplicity, in my opinion, may ultimately cripple Twitter.  I have long been a proponent of the service, and still wish them the best.  From an end-user’s perspective, however, I am not getting enough value.  Additionally, the service has remained mostly identical from when I signed up over a year ago.  With massive mainstream exposure and a ridiculous spike in users, I feel as though Twitter could have extended the service’s functionality.  For instance, we still don’t have the ability to create groups!  That just doesn’t seem right!  I definitely understand the appeal of simplicity, but in Twitter’s case, this simplicity may come at a price.

Update: Just hours after posting this article, Twitter updated its user interface for everyone.  Now users are shown Trending Topics right on their Twitter homepage.  In addition, users are able to search tweets and save search results for later reference.  A huge step forward for Twitter.