Is it me, or does Twitter seem to do big feature upgrades (e.g. New Twitter) while Google\/Amazon\/Facebook do things more incrementally? \u00a0I know the big guys occasionally do big updates, but I always notice new little features here and there. \u00a0Some become permanent, others go away after a while.<\/p>\n
The main advantage of the incremental approach is the ability to make corrections mid-stream. \u00a0It also makes it easier to abandon the (inevitable) ideas that don’t pan out: \u00a0small things are easier to walk away from than big things.<\/p>\n
You can see this difference in approach between Facebook and Twitter with the design of status updates. \u00a0In early 2009, Facebook redesigned to be more Twitter-like, and since then, they’ve out-innovated on many aspects of the status update model: \u00a0“likes”, “likes” of comments, rich data types, presentation\/aggregation techniques in the news feed, etc. \u00a0Meanwhile, Twitter still <\/strong>hasn’t figure out a good comment design for tweets!<\/p>\n But doing things incrementally isn’t easy. \u00a0You not only need an incremental culture and mindset within product leadership, but you need an implementation architecture that supports it: \u00a0modularity, good APIs, excellent release engineering (and an ability to un-release features), and measurement tools.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Is it me, or does Twitter seem to do big feature upgrades (e.g. New Twitter) while Google\/Amazon\/Facebook do things more incrementally? \u00a0I know the big guys occasionally do big updates, but I always notice new little features here and there. … Continue reading