When Twitter launched a lot of the early commentary was about how that style of application had already been done and done better, where better meant more featu

When Twitter launched a lot of the early commentary was about how that style of application had already been done and done better, where better meant more features. Upoch had groups. Dodgeball had a mini language for describing what you were doing. But neither of those applications had the one feature that mattered: people. So, I think the author has it right when he says that simplicity makes it easier to get at the network effects. In many cases the value of the network effects dwarf any other feature you could imagine. However, that doesn't mean that social software can't be complicated. MySpace is complicated. Facebook only seems simple because it's compared to MySpace.