Creativity

I really enjoyed the article “Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers” by Claire Cain Miller for the NYT. The article is about users’ impact on products; especially on new media products e.g. Twitter.

“Twitter’s smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, ‘Gee, let’s not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let’s outsource design to them,’ ” (…)

Who better knows how to improve a product then people who actually use it? Why pay someone to come up with the idea for advancement if there are people willing to do it for free. Sharing new ideas about new media products is sooo easy. You just post the idea and then wait to see if other users like it. With regular goods e.g. cars, if one has an idea of an improvement he/she can only write to the producers and hope that they won’t disregard his/her comment(which is very likely to happen); on top of it other users won’t be able to respond to that idea, to declare their support (or the opposite). On the Twitter example we can see that those producers/managers may not always like some ideas at first, but users’ support for some features may change that eventually.

The founders did not like several user-generated Twitter features at first, but accepted them once they saw that others were adopting them, Mr. Williams said. When people started referring to Twitter posts as “tweets,” Twitter resisted until a few months ago, when it applied for a trademark on the term.  

Another way new media expands our creativity is thru virtual scrapbooking http://www.scrapblog.com/. Today we may freeze our favorite memories in virtual world, and send them worldwide in minutes.