Extensible Social Media

The ongoing social media revolution has given us many new ways to communicate with each other. I would like to highlight one of these new avenues of discourse, Twitter, and talk about how its extensibility is it’s greatest feature. This property of extensibility is highly prized within software engineering – an extensible system can more easily morph as needed to keep up with the changing demands that the world places on it. Think about what a message posted to Twitter, a “tweet”, can contain: you can reply to somebody else with the “@name” notation, you can tag your tweet with the “#tag” hashtag notation, send private messages with “d name message”, and media can be shared with shortened links. Twitter has created what is arguably the simplest social networking service, centered around just 140 characters, and it has been amazingly successful in doing so. While other services like Facebook need a web browser or mobile application for access, Twitter’s minimal-yet-functional interface can be used by the still millions of people who don’t have a smart phone. As stated before, this simplicity has not held Twitter back. In fact, hashtags were not originally an official Twitter feature. Hashtags originated in 2007 as a community-led convention before being fully and officially integrated into the Twitter service. Retweets (forwarding a friend’s tweet) also originated from community conventions before being officially codified by Twitter. While I don’t know what the next big Twitter feature will be, I am quite confident that their extensible platform will be able to handle it.