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How Twitter is not simple

Tuesday, June 02, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Early-on in the life of Twitter I tried to figure out how it works behind the user interface, and was told I couldn't, that it was very complex, and I shouldn't try. This bothered me then, and it bothers me even more now. After all, I'm an experienced software engineer, with a number of products under my belt, some quite complex. If I can't understand it, who can? And if they say I can't, do they? 

We know the networks we're building on Twitter are very fragile things, but they're more fragile than most users have been willing to comprehend, because we can't find out how it works. We have to trust that the company knows, and that they will continue to operate it as they have in the past. However we don't have any right to that service, and if they restricted it or took it away we would have no recourse.  

Of course it would be a disaster for them as a company, but such disasters have happened before and they certainly will happen again. And what do we actually know about the people who run Twitter? Not all that much. They don't tweet a lot, and when they do, they tend to be short messages, and often cryptic. 

So while Twitter is useful and fascinating, even intriguing, is it simple?  

It it not simple.