Twitter this, Twitter that II.

I found about Michael Jackson's death last night, via Twitter. RIP King of Pop. Even though I never was a proper fan, I think he's been a major factor in the culture of late 20th century. The music will live on.

Suddenly it became a bit clearer what is the magic of Twitter, for me. Information comes to me, I do not actively come to it. I have no idea what I'm going to see each time I open TweetDeck.

This is also known as the Hollywood Principle and IOC . It's used heavily in the software world and the main benefit is the removal of coupling among systems, computers, components, classes or files. One part of system doesn't assume anything about others, it declares its capabilities and lets others use it. The less coupling, the less assumptions, the less plumbing, the cleaner and simpler designs and lesser potential for mistakes. It makes it easier to develop great software. It also makes it easy to understand.

IOC has caused a shift in the software development paradigms and it's also changing the way we digest information in general. Applications like Twitter are trully Inverting the Control of Information flow from "browse and search" to "publish and subscribe".

Twitter may come and go, but it has moved the paradigm shift along a bit. It didn't start the shift, either, there's been bss and newsgroups and rss feeds long before it. I used to think rss is the greatest, just like I do about Twitter, now. Rss reader is still one of the most heavily utilized applications on my smart phone. Twitter is simpler, faster and more engaging. Search results from search.twitter.com are great complement to Google search.

Any (web) application needs to be aware of this shift. Information access needs to be simplified, simplified, simplified. It is not that there's too much of information, it is that it's too tedious to get to. If it's not simple, I'm not interested - and I'll never know how great a product you might have.