Blogs, Twitter, Feature Creep and Entropy

(via Winer)

Think of the initial appeal of Blogger: you type into some little text field, and it appears on the web, and everyone can read it. Easy and delightful. But blogging didn’t stop there, because people quite reasonably wanted to have titles. Sure, titles, of course, we need titles, I agree. And then, of course, Slashdot had departments, so don’t weblogs need categories or something like that? A weblog is a kind of knowledge management app, after all, and categories are a pretty lightweight addition. Okay, sure, categories, let’s add ’em. The only thing that’s lost is the sheer delight of that simple text field for posting to the web.

And that is why people get giddy about Twitter. It re-strips the concept of instant self-expression to the basic: 140 characters and a SEND button.