Web Development looks fascinating!

Hi! I recently started understanding how web development works and while learning HTML and CSS and getting introduced to web development, slowly the why so many things are there to make the website got unveiled. The sheer amount of things are baffling at face but let's reverse engineer a website. Talk about Twitter? let's do it!

Let's do an observation from the interface. Making a product from the start.. So let's say we are making an app where people express their thoughts. Great. So we need a name and photo at least to tell who wrote that thought? - Idea - Signup form.

Now let's say one person signed up and all different people sign up on the website. How do I connect to people who I know and would like to read what they wrote? Idea - Username. It will help search people by an unique identifier. Also a search box to search usernames.

Great. I searched the person and saw their thoughts but do I need to search for them every time? Idea - timeline. What will timeline do? It will show me tweets of people I follow. Great! If I like what they are writing how do I let them know? Idea - Like button.

What if I need to write something about it? Umm Yes! Idea - Add comments or replies to it or what about a full fledged chat section! Great! Now I really like to share this 10 other friends of mine on this same website! Oh that's easy..

Idea - Re-Tweet. Re-tweet - recommended tweet? Retweet will show who shared what and who it was recommended by. Great my friends are proud about it. My knowledgeable friend's wisdom now reaches us.

But people I know of talk about very limited things I might be interested in.. Idea - Gather topics that interest people. Super but what to do with the interest? Process it to understand the sentiment and topic of tweet based on a sample of tweets. Great and then what? Accumulate these tweets into a set.. Done.. but how to use that for people?

Idea - Topics! Show additionally tweets from other people that are around same topics which the user interacts in.. Awesome.. But but.. can I know what other topics people are talking in large numbers? Yes!!! Idea - Trending section..

Let's see what topic is suddenly being written about and feature it in trending section. Let's make it interesting. What if people are interested not only in their area but also beyond? Great! So trending topics for local and country level then?! YES!

Nice. But hey! What about the tweet that was written around this xyz topic and supposedly by that abc guy? How do I find it? Idea - Advanced Search. Find anything you want through Advanced Search.

Awesome! Now I find a lot of great tweets by this profile, who is that person? Idea - add bio, links, a header picture for people to express who they are! Sounds perfect! And what if I want to write to them directly? Idea - Direct messages!

And we can go on! This is how one feature after another gets identified and then translated to functionality for a large bunch of people. While doing that the design has to be good else people won't stick for long.

Translating functionality into designs that exactly does what the idea was is a great feat. With the ever growing different devices it is important that the experience stays the same and this is where a maintenance team is necessary.

They have to ensure that the experience is consistent across all the different devices. For a website like Twitter, the content also requires a lot of moderation and hence the report, mute and block functionality.

We started reverse engineering with a simple function that something like Twitter might have started and see how data can allow so much possibility to make users stick to the app and also be useful to people.

Of course data also allows you to advertise based on such data and that is where money can be made.

So the next time you think of Twitter, think how far they have come and think of how much is there to maintain such a diverse set of features from this website.

Web Development knowledge has really opened so much to see what is possible! Incredible isn't it?

---

Hi I am Swapnil and you can also connect with me on Twitter