Twitter: Celebrity Gossip Network or Democratic Activist Network? Neither, It's Your Network

Back in 2007 when I first saw Twitter, I saw a dumb-down Facebook. It lets you send short text-only status update only. No photo attachment, no user-friendly UI, and even the status update was limited to 140 characters. I didn't think much of Twitter. It seemed to me that it was yet another social media that are competing for internet user's fragmented attention span.

Who Would Have Thought Twitter
Would Become A Symbol Of Egypt Revolution?

Forward the clock all the way to January of 2011. You cannot escape mention of Twitter from main stream media. From Grammy Awards to Tahrir Square Twitter has forever changed how people interact with crowd. Twitter has equalized the playing fields for all so that any one could influence in shaping collective consciousness.

LinkedIn's Challenge During Rapid Growth: Balancing Good, Bad, and Ignorant

Reid Hoffman Has Been Working Behind The Scene
To Make LinkedIn IPO a Success

As you might have heard, LinkedIn is moving in full speed ahead to go public. With added PR surrounding first social network site to file for IPO, the professional social networking site has been steadily picking up new users along the way. Last time I wrote about LinkedIn back in early October 2010, user base was around 80 million. Now there are reports suggesting that user base has climbed to 90 million as of early January 2011.

All these growth means good thing for both LinkedIn users and those who earn paycheck thinking about how to harness the power of social networking sites. But I am a little circumspect in accepting the rapid growth as all good news.

Here's why:

Best UI Is One That Attracts User Then Gets Out Of User's Way

These days one design trend that I hear often is minimalism. In my book, this translates to putting the absolute minimum design elements while providing functional software. Minimalism is a good guideline for designer to force themselves to think carefully about each design element. If something is not absolutely needed, then chances are it will do more harm than good to overall product usability.

That's because great product UI/UX should do following:


1. It should make target users want to use the product
2. Once the users get their hands on, it should disappear in the background