Since Twitter‘s debut on the web, it has been one of the closest followers of the web 2.0 philosophy. It satisfied a previously unseen niche in the web, practically inventing the “Micro-blog” in a world where everything continually gets smaller and faster in order to satisfy our increasingly attention-deficit society.

But Twitter has done more than just invent a service where one can “tweet” about everything from a new company product, an unraveling news event or even a random personal event (such as even a weird sneeze, as I’ve seen). Twitter’s impact on an apparently previously-unsatisfied aspect of its users’ lives has gone on to cause a revolution within the designs of other well-established websites, which we aim to discuss here in great detail.

Twitter’s design has always been described as simple, small, to-the-point and yet extensible. Websites like Facebook have even gone on to redesign their entire layout (to the annoyance of many of its users) in order to ride the wave Twitter seems to cause with its design.

Facebook is not alone in this adoption of Twitter’s design, however: many websites throughout the web, either subtly or not-so-subtly, implement this simplistic layout with a heavy emphasis on developer integration and as a result we can safely say that Twitter has spawned its very own design trend throughout the web.

This trend can be described as a move to a simpler, more intuitive and summary-based design adopted by sites such as FML. The design also implements the web 2.0 quality of a JavaScript-heavy interface design, further promoting the simplicity of the interface via fewer page loads in favor of AJAX-based updating tactics while simultaneously allowing strong developer integration via this same API.

I personally admire the trend, as a member of the increasingly ADD society I mentioned earlier, but only if it isn’t too overdone, oversimplistic or too Twitter-like. Nobody likes a copycat. To follow a design trend and blatantly rip off another site are two completely different things, yet some sites tend to blur the line.

That said, Twitter has made it a habit to spawn its own league of copycat sites, the most famous of which is a site called Plurk. This site aims to achieve the exact same goal as Twitter, only with a “better community”. Right. And the fake emmys I see in gas stations are just as influential.

In this manner, its almost as if Twitter’s design pattern is so influential (with users such as Oprah, Ashton Kutcher etc.) that other sites are feeling a sense of what I would term as “Web Darwinism“: the feeling that if a site doesn’t succumb to the new wave of web interface design, it will be phased out by the superior sites that do.

Developer Integration

A new trend that Twitter has set, without being so much of a trend amongst users as much as developers, has been its API. The API has further extended Twitter’s popularity by allowing apps like Tweetdeck, Twitteriffic and Twitterberry to bring Twitter into a variety of newer platforms, inherently increasing its user base.

Not only does the API allow deploying Twitter communication natively from hardware platforms, but even from the web itself – countless websites allow two-way Twitter communication via this same API, and this has taken Twitter from just-another-web-service to an extensible web collaboration interface with large amounts of integration from both users and developers alike to the point where its growth is nearly exponential.

Other sites that have adopted this API focus (even those predating Twitter) have almost always excelled in the field of providing a web-based service, and non-Twitter sites like Yahoo!, Google, and the Twitter-inspired URL-shorteners have all demonstrated this.

Spawned Services

Speaking of URL shorteners, Twitter was possibly the best thing to happen to the already-established TinyURL, which saw an increase in its usage level from its newfound Twitter user base trying to cram long querystring-heavy URLs into the newly-imposed 140 character text limit.

Other sites such as Bit.ly and ow.ly have started a similar (and, IMHO better) service both in response to Twitter’s limit and to provide an even shorter alternative to tinyurl.com. In addition, most of these new sites utilize both an open developer API like Twitter and a simple JavaScript interface following the design trend Twitter motivated in the first place.

(and as a side note, use bit.ly instead of ow.ly – the 301 redirects will benefit your site better than ow.ly’s framing bullshit)

So Twitter’s impact on the web from several standpoints is unmistakable, either made popular because of its increasingly massive (and celebrity-full) user base, its growth as a service due to increased developer integration, or just its likable simplistic interface design. Sites continue to follow in Twitter’s footsteps, which is seen as a good thing as far as having an open API and a more modern user interface for the web’s users.