Sometimes, removing features can make a product more robust. A great example of that recently took place at Twitter when they reworked the “friends”/”followers” system.
Here is how Twitter used to work:
- If there was someone that you wanted to stay connected with you would “add” them. This added them as a friend and started you “following” them.
- If you later wanted to top following that friend, you could simply send a message to Twitter that said “leave [friend name]“. At that point you would no longer receive notifications via IM or SMS.
- Even if you left someone, they were still your “friend” on Twitter. On the web, you would still see their updates.
Did you follow that? (pun intended)
Now it is much simpler. You either follow someone or you don’t. There are no more friends, only “followers”. Additionally, they added the ability to stop receiving notifications from individuals even though you are still following them.
I think what the people at Twitter realized is that they had a complicate feature division that could be simplified. Google has this same problem, but they have not ratified it.
Google Reader allows you to “share” an item or “star” an item. The difference is that “shared” items are public and “starred” items are not. The term “star” is a legacy concept from GMail (and really probably goes back to the browser’s star icon for marking an item as a favorite).
Google does not need both starred items and shared items for most users. Personally, I only have a use for shared items. The thing is that I only use Google Reader on my phone (I use NetNewsWire on my laptop). The problem is that the mobile version of Google Reader only has starred items, there is no way to share an item.
If Google would simplify their reader and only have “starred items” and add an option to make starred items public, it would be much better.
