

Ask YC:  Doesn't twitter demonstrate that a good idea badly implemented can still succeed? - amichail

The UI in particular is surprisingly poor.  And yet Twitter is successful anyway.
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iamdave
I don't think the idea that the UI alone being "poor" means it was badly
implemented. Maybe you can elaborate more of how it was "badly implemented".

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amichail
The UI is the most noticeable thing. And if it's bad, then that doesn't give
you much confidence in the rest of the implementation. And indeed, I hear
Twitter has scalability issues.

As for what's wrong with the UI, here are some things:

* replying to people by including a @ with their name somewhere in your message is really silly

* no search feature that looks at the content of messages

* doesn't look right when you use a larger font

Basically, it looks like it was hacked together in a week and not much was
done to improve it later.

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iamdave
"* replying to people by including a @ with their name somewhere in your
message is really silly"

I hate to play semantics here, but that's something users do. That's not at
all a UI matter, as we're the ones who decide to include the @ symbol when
replying to someone. However, it's also very handy to see it because I
immediately realize the person is talking to me, and not just referencing me.

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amichail
Twitter looks for that symbol to decide what goes under "Replies".

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breily
They only started doing that because users were

[http://help.twitter.com/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=63](http://help.twitter.com/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=63)

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iamdave
Too, and saying "it doesn't look right" is more of an opinion than a serious
problem with the UI meaning the application was poorly implemented.

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superchink
I disagree about Twitter. I don't think the UI is really all that poor. It's
not revolutionary, but it's not bad, and it does the job.

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kadavy
I don't necessarily feel that the UI is poor, it's the Product Management that
sucks. So many features they _should_ have but don't. But I guess they benefit
from the fact that lots of developers take the reigns and make their own stuff
that uses Twitter.

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joshsharp
I don't know, I think its simplicity is a positive thing. I'm sure there was a
real temptation to add file sharing, etc. etc., but I like that it's been
pared right back to the core functionality.

