Digital Ninja

I got to thinking today about how large-scale web application products should be advanced. There are different models to examine as reference.

There's the Google model: leave the whole thing in beta and throw features out on the production deck when they're done. This is a cool model if you have something that is not mission critical for a business, or perhaps you have a user base that is willing to walk a danger line in order to reap the benefits of new features faster. The down side here is of course the possible bugs that will find their way into the mix, or perhaps a strategy doesn't line up and the development team ends up rewriting large pieces of the product to get back on track, once the track is realized.

Then there is the corporate product model: make damned sure everything is QA'd to death six ways 'till Sunday, following a planned time line and delivery date. It's really more of a traditional model of software engineering, and you'll see it in off-the-shelf products. Your benefits here are reliability, predictability on releases, and a plan that melds better with the methodologies of a traditional development team. The down side is that 4 month wait (or whatever lengthy term) the users have to wait for their bullet-proof results.

I'm not sure which I prefer. Option one will give you great user interaction, and possibly satisfaction - if they're an open minded bunch that is. Option two provides more freedom and breathing room for developers - which is what I am. Anyway, these are things we can ponder.

I was just introduced to Twitter Keys today and it struck a small chord with me. From what I am seeing, they are extended ASCII codes like hearts, music notes, etc. that can help a tweet stay within the limited number of characters. While helpful for efficient communication amongst humans, this isn't going to be very helpful with Twitter indexing/searching services.

Being symbols, these little graphics have no immediate meaning to a computer that is filtering, looking for words like "love". That search will skip right over the heart symbol, unless we (the developers of the world) code specifically to include that heart symbol in the search as an appropriate derivation of "love". That's fine... but this starts to cascade really fast. Couldn't it also mean "coronary" as well? And Valentine? Each symbol (or picture) is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, and we will start losing some of that search-ability and organization in the social web that it needs so badly right now.

I think Twitter Keys are valuable to individual humans that are reading Tweets. I think they are bad for the web and the evolution of Twitter/micro-blogging.