Is it me, or does Twitter seem to do big feature upgrades (e.g. New Twitter) while Google/Amazon/Facebook do things more incrementally?  I know the big guys occasionally do big updates, but I always notice new little features here and there.  Some become permanent, others go away after a while.

The main advantage of the incremental approach is the ability to make corrections mid-stream.  It also makes it easier to abandon the (inevitable) ideas that don’t pan out:  small things are easier to walk away from than big things.

You can see this difference in approach between Facebook and Twitter with the design of status updates.  In early 2009, Facebook redesigned to be more Twitter-like, and since then, they’ve out-innovated on many aspects of the status update model:  “likes”, “likes” of comments, rich data types, presentation/aggregation techniques in the news feed, etc.  Meanwhile, Twitter still hasn’t figure out a good comment design for tweets!

But doing things incrementally isn’t easy.  You not only need an incremental culture and mindset within product leadership, but you need an implementation architecture that supports it:  modularity, good APIs, excellent release engineering (and an ability to un-release features), and measurement tools.

For all the hype, the iPad still has a few quirks/drawbacks.  My list:

• No camera. What doesn’t have a camera these days?
• Can’t charge from most USB ports. They don’t put out enough power, you have to use a wall-charger.  This means that you’ve got to manage two distinct things:  syncing and charging.
• iTunes umbilical cord. The iPad is nearly a laptop; why do I need to tether it to iTunes to do key operations (like unbox it)?  Also, why can’t I sync with iTunes via Wifi?
• No printing.  (built-in support, anyway)
• Limited app selection. Expected, but improving.  iPad apps can be much more complex, so the ramp may be slower than it was for the iPhone.

Given how Apple iterated on the first iPhone, I’d expect the same thing to happen here.  I love my iPad, but I’d expect iPad 3.0 to be even more impressive.

I have a long-running discussion with a number of friends:  what’s next for email?

After all, email hasn’t changed much in the past few decades.  Email readers have gotten slightly better over the years, with improved multimedia handling, searching, threading, calendar integration, etc.  In a lot of ways, email clients have been just good enough (e.g. Outlook) there haven’t been huge incentive for breakthroughs.

Also, instant messaging has overlapped with email.  How many times have you had a quick email exchange, then opened IM/chat to finish the discussion?  Some exchanges are interactive, and don’t lend themselves to an email message format.

I’m not sure if Google Wave will “catch”, but it’s the first thing I’ve seen in a long time that could be the evolution of email.

Great products rarely come about through committee design.  I’ve never seen it myself — behind every great product, there’s always been one or two obsessed people.

And it’s not enough just to be obsessed, you’ve got to be obsessed about details.  Most people can’t or won’t get into the details.

 From time to time, I send feedback to friends about their products and Web sites, some of it really really specific.  One recent one was about date selection from a calendar:  on a two-month-wide pop-up, they could have optimized the “end” date selection a bit better based on a chosen “start” date, when the start date was at or near a month boundary.

Are you rolling your eyes yet? 

This is how great products happen, one little bit of obsessed detail at a time. 

I currently lug around:  a phone, a MacBook laptop, an iPod, a small camera, and way too many cables and power supplies.  Amazon’s Kindle is interesting, but adding an eBook reader to my pile doesn’t help.  This is really about convergence:  why do I need to buy something new to read eBooks?

What I really want:  a Small Device that I always carry in a pocket, and a Big Device that I carry in my laptop case or in my backpackingmall luggage.

The Small Device is a telephone, video phone, content reader, audio player, video player, Web surfer, digital camera, etc.  It’s dominated by the screen (e.g. as large as possible), and it uses a high-quality touch and gesture interface.  It has great wireless connectivity.  The iPhone is the closest current offering.

The Big Device is nearly identical, but with a much larger screen.  It may also have a keyboard, or may clamshell like a laptop but with two screens, allowing you to touch type (or use other gestures) on the bottom screen.  It has an “always on” UI — it doesn’t boot like a laptop, it’s just there.

Big and Small are totally synced.   If I take a picture on Small, I can immediately view it on Big.  If I stop reading a book on Big, I can resume reading at the same spot on Small.  They both have great displays, tons of storage, and long battery life.

(And eventually, Big may go away, because I’ll have a big screen display in all of the places I live and work.)

Phones and MP3 players have already converged — how long until we get to this milestone?