Making the sale

Trying to sell people on new tech is hard. You can make the arguments, show how easy it can be, buff the benefits so much that you can see the second hand car dealer inside of you, but yet it still depends on the subject sitting down by themselves and giving it a go. The biggest example I’d give is Twitter. I wonderful application, with plenty of great things built on the API I find I get a lot of out tweeting. However I do think it’s tough to start out with. Twitter only gets interesting once you start to get a regular flow in of tweets that you can then respond to. Your responses get you more followers and so on.

I am certainly not the only one to notice. Here is @Ev talking about trying to lower barriers to entry (specifically from 3:20 onwards).

I think this is the big issue for any start up. They have to be able to make it easy enough for people to get into, while providing a stimulating enough experience to keep people in. A List Apart have a good article regarding flow for websites which I think is appropriate for any tech startup. And it’s step 2 that I think Twitter fails on – “Provide Immediate Feedback”. This is much easier for the celebrities who enter the Twittersphere who, as soon as they are introduced, get a massive influx of followers. After Stephen Fry spoke about Twitter on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross I thought I’d check out what kind of messages he was getting and it was obvious there are those struggling when they start off. Other startups such as Last.fm, Spotify or Dopplr enable the user to immediately interact by listening to music or discover how much CO₂ their last trip created.

So can Twitter make it easier for people to get started? Lets hope so. I love it here.

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