Ask HN: Why did Twitter succeed? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why did Twitter succeed?

103 pointsshadowsun788 comments

Hi HN,

I've never really understood Twitter as a business, and so I figure that since it's been bugging me for a good two years now, I'd might as well give it a shot and ask the good folks here for their thoughts on this. Any insight is appreciated.

1) What problem does Twitter solve? Some of the best startups are created around specific solutions to specific problems. Twitter is a non-specific solution to a whole host of problems. It is used differently by different kinds of people. So ... what problem does it really solve? Or is there no specific problem here, and we just have a communal itch that we want to scratch that the Twitter format helps?

2) YC tells its applicants: 'make something people want'. But while Twitter does make something people want, it's not clear what that is. Could Twitter be an example of stumbling, by pure accident, into something people want? Does this imply that there is no way to intentionally create a company like Twitter?

3) Why is Twitter so successful? Twitter seems to be the only company with no clear value proposition (I'm not saying there's no value - I'm just saying that it's hard to explain what that value is to a non-Twitter user); also it seems to be one of the few startups that can get away with producing a generalized platform as its main product. Wave didn't. Why did Twitter succeed where Wave did not?

Thoughts, ideas, and observations are all welcomed.

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From: http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html

Twitter is important because it’s a new protocol. Fundamentally it’s a messaging protocol where you don’t specify the recipients. It’s really more of a discovery than an invention; that square was always there in the periodic table of protocols, but no one had quite hit it squarely.

We could try to draw a small excerpt of this 'periodic table':

              LONG    SHORT
  ONE:ONE     email   im/sms
  ONE:PUBLIC  blogs   twitter

Of course, the axes aren't exact. You can write arbitrarily short emails and blogposts, and lengthy IMs. Twitter is usually 'public' but only viewed by some set of friends/acquaintances/fans, and interactions range from chatty conversations to long lagged correspondences. Each box bleeds into the others with crossover communications.

But you get the idea; the signature modes of each big success are variations on a theme, nailing a new permutation. And it shouldn't be surprising that blogging pioneers happened upon the adjacent twitter opportunity at the right time.

You could build similar tables where an axis-of-contrast is EPHEMERAL/ARCHIVED, or BUSINESS/PLEASURE, or TEXT/AUDIOVISUAL, or REALTIME/TIME-LAGGED, or SIMPLE/POWERFUL, and see some of the same things appear in the quadrants, or other familiar services, or gaping holes -- where there may be Twitter-sized opportunity waiting.

Blogs existed well before twitter. Blogging also sends messages to nowhere.

Not guaranteed-short messages, collected in a merged timeline, with interruption (via SMS delivery) as a common/easy option.

There is a dimension on which blogging and Twitter are similar. That's why they share a row in the table! But the added constraint, and the possibilities unleashed by that constraint, are a crucial part of Twitter's success.

Blogs themselves aren't short but the RSS feeds for them usually are. Blogs + RSS roughly equals Blog + Twitter with link but for some reason Twitter took over from RSS/Atom.

for some reason Twitter took over from RSS/Atom

Part of the reason is sitting right there in this sentence. You can't even bring yourself to call RSS "RSS", because the so-called "standard" has more forks than the devil's toolshed.

But the real reason RSS loses is that it's built on XML, and because nobody actually wants to look at XML a feed is read and written solely by computers, for whose convenience its design has been optimized. Twitter, on the other hand, is a protocol designed to be read and written directly by humans. It excludes all the ugly, verbose, oft-redundant tags and just delivers a message, which may contain an arbitrary number of #hashtags, @addresses, URLs, and blither in whatever order seems appropriate. The result feels human, instead of like the homework from a 1978 class on data processing. And it's really malleable: To invent a new way of Twittering all you have to do is type something and hope that enough of the audience can figure it out.

> But the real reason RSS loses is that it's built on XML, and because nobody actually wants to look at XML a feed is read and written solely by computers, for whose convenience its design has been optimized

Not really sure why you say that. RSS was pretty successful for a while - successful enough to get built into every browser and most email clients. End user consumers never saw the XML and the publishing side was usually built into blog software so neither did the publishers. I think this is not so much about XML but rather a more generic notion of simplicity - the whole concept of Twitter is so brain dead simple that it removes nearly all friction in adopting it. It's a much more general simplicity than just the encoding.

I assumed he was talking about tumblr, which is (I am told) a short, multimedia-rich blog service.

You're right about Twitter hitting the missing square in the periodic table. I think you glaze over the importance of the short nature of Twitter, though.

Yes, you can write arbitrarily short blog posts. But you don't, because you feel like you have an obligation to make your official blog be a well written, safe-for-future-eyes snapshot of your personality. Most of us have started a blog with grand intentions and given up after the effort of crafting essays carefully became too much.

Twitter requires no more commitment than a minute of your time. The simplicity of the medium (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jackdorsey/182613360/) is its greatest strength, and it is also why nobody else was able to make it. It takes a special sort of daring to provide a product that does so little. I'm sure users are constantly clamoring for the 140 character limit to be lifted, for new features to be added, and for more in general. But if Twitter had been created with no emphasis on short, simple messages, it would've been just like all the other blog ecosystems.

The impact of the small commitment goes beyond the importance to the average user. I think that one of the huge factors in Twitter's success was all of the hype generated by celebrities. What better way for celebrities to connect with their fans? They can do it in the privacy of their home, it takes nearly zero effort, they get extra points for being tech-savvy, and they cut out the middleman of the media. For the star basketball player who think he's misunderstood (e.g., @TheRealShaq), this is perfect. No more media twisting his words, just one-on-one conversation. Except it's better than one-on-one, because the whole world gets to see how you treat your fans.

In short, I think Twitter took off because even though they didn't know it yet, people yearned for a low effort medium of communication.

As a fan of oulipo, I totally agree the shortness constraint has powerful positive impacts on Twitter's adoption. It changes how writers write, how readers read, and how groups converse in various permutations.

The 'ONE:ONE'/'ONE:MANY' and 'LONG':'SHORT' dimensions are not the only ones in which Twitter colonizes a new part of the possibility space, just the easiest ones to label. (We may need new words to describe all the hybrids of communication styles enabled by Twitter.)

"It takes a special sort of daring to provide a product that does so little."

I'm hanging on to this one. :)

You got it!

twitter seems to be in just the correct niche (blog/email/sms) AND timeframe (a.k.a. Smartphones & mobile flatrates)

Equality and Access are two important factors behind Twitter success. Unlike Facebook and other social networking platform, I do not need permission from a celebrity to add him as friend, before I can send him message. It also doesn't stop me in following anybody. Without that permission, everyone is at same level. So reiterate, Equality and Access are two important factors behind Twitter success apart from some other points discussed here.

So i worked at Odeo and was involved in the initial product exploration and creation of Twitter.

It was not created accidentally. We were experimenting with and thinking about the way people communicate. What if it were casual and open. In the same time as we did the first prototype of twitter, we also built hellodeo, very similar to stickem/dailyboot, a kind of social voicemail, a mocked out groupware 2.0, etc...

We looked a lot at SMS, interviewed teens who used lots of sms, played with txtmob.org and UPOC as examples of something similar with explicit groups. At one point i remember, Ev i think, saying "what if we just made a clone of UPOC, but without explicit groups." Or something to that effect.

We started using it, and with a couple hundred users who liked it, we were sending hundreds of thousands of tweets a month. Few people used the first versions, but those who did, became hugely addictive. The half a dozen other prototypes we built, didn't have passion. Twitter, people loved or hated, or both.

Evan Williams then took his resources from selling Blogger.com to google pre-ipo, and was able to buy the VC's out. His original idea was to do Obvious Corp, continue the prototyping and process which had created twitter. Unfortunately Twitter overwhelmed Obvious, and they spent the next couple of years just playing catchup.

It's not hard to do good new product work. Spend time really getting to know a space, look at practices people are engaging in. Then start thinking about variations. Are people doing something in their social practices, by using technology NOT how it was intended. What if you shaped tech for those intentions.

Twitter's lesson is you can do prototypes until you find something which is compelling, then keep doing what people want, based on their actions (not what they say they want.) If you do that, then you'll eventually figure out a business model.

Back when I used AOL/AIM in high school there was an explosive adoption of "always on" internet services such as DSL and cable. During this time, it became fashionable for teens to express their current emotions/actions/likes as their "Away Messages" on AIM, which was something new compared with the limitations their previous dial-up connections. I'd go as far to say these messages were the precursor to services like LiveJournal.

Since college, with the mass adoption of social networks, I would guess that 95% of all my friends no longer use independent chat services, like AIM.

I see twitter as the next iteration of "Away Messages" - or, what they now call status updates.

Personally, I dislike Twitter for my personal use. I think it is a fascinating way for brands to sell products to unsuspecting consumers, but there is no value as a standalone "Away Message" platform... that would be the job of something like Facebook status updates, since all of my friends are already connected on there.

As for how it grew? It both filled the need for people to continually express themselves and that other really important thing... celebrity endorsements.

+1. That's exactly how I view Twitter - as a modern version of "away messages." I remember looking forward to the always-on Internet connection in college dorms as a way to set long-lasting away messages so friends can see what I'm doing or some witty remark I thought of.

"Personally, I dislike Twitter for my personal use. I think it is a fascinating way for brands to sell products to unsuspecting consumers, but there is no value as a standalone "Away Message" platform... that would be the job of something like Facebook status updates, since all of my friends are already connected on there."

Twitter seems better for personal use. Advertising/commercial use is everywhere, and it's nice to have a tool that's relatively uncluttered where I'm not being "targeted".

There are several advantages of twitter being "a standalone 'away message' platform" over Facebook:

•It's simpler (both in its look and its goal). I don't have to worry about applications, games, polls, or whatever else people do on Facebook that isn't communicating a single, focused idea, link, or observation. To me all that stuff isn't added value, it's just more baggage.

•Following can be one-sided, whereas friending is an agreement and is based on a real-life identity. I don't need to have a pre-existing connection to follow or be followed on twitter. Because Facebook is based on who you actually are, it doesn't have a "shit my dad says" or a "yelling bird" or whatever else that's silly and entertaining unless you have that one hilarious friend.

It's a social and sociable take on the problem RSS was intended to revolutionize but hasn't really delivered on. Its only ideological conceit, of 140 character messages, actually simplifies the user experience and keeps the "communities" that form there on the rails. "Chat" is arguably one of the "stickiest" and most compelling applications of the Internet, and Twitter delivers a chat-like experience with huge numbers of people that manages to be both non-ephemeral (IM and IRC conversations disappear forever as soon as they end) and (therefore) discoverable.

I don't believe for a second that Twitter realized any of this when they started; like so many good things on the Internet, Twitter's benefits are emergent, not planned.

Wave is what you get when you try to catalog all the possible benefits of Twitter and plan a product to deliver those benefits.

I honestly think people often forget the reasons things succeed in the beginning and replace them with the reasons they are successful now. You know the main reason I think Twitter was successful? They had an SMS gateway. I knew loads of people who never sat in front of a computer except for a few minutes a day at best. It's easy for us constantly-connected internet geeks to forget how the rest of the world lives. These people were completely isolated from real-time one-to-many messaging we all take for granted with email, IM, & RSS. Twitter filled that gap. They got a huge following from people who had no regular internet access but unlimited SMS.

The other major factors were simplicity (at a functional but also an API level) and the alignment of self interest with the digerati who in their quest for self-promotion became instantly addicted to Twitter's public follower numbers. Thus it became the topic of nearly every tech podcast for a good 12 months straight with sickening regularity.

Yes i agree with this. And i think should they have come in a little later they would have missed the boat so in this regard they are lucky. In terms of how they have maintained and grew twitter to what it is now, that is skill.

If connection to the internet on mobile phones was mainstream at the time twitter started the SMS gateway would have been redundant just as it is right now.

I know alot of people who use twitter now and im pretty sure none of them know you can tweet via an SMS as most of them have twitter apps installed on their mobiles.

Solved a real problem: sending text messages to a group.

Later, it allowed people to get semi-personal access to people they admire.

Sending text messages to a group is not a real problem, and Twitter doesn't easily let you do that either (unless everyone has a twitter account).

Agreed. The narcissistic element is key to Twitter. You can tweet one-liners all day with very little effort and get a lot of @ replies from people doing the same thing. It has the same addictive quality as great games because the effort / reward cycle is short.

Although this is true, I think it is missing the point. What was the problem text messages was trying to solve?

A quick, semi-personal connection between two people across a distance. This can further be boiled down as humans interest in connection and conversation.

It turns out that Twitter, due to the social network (both existing and being one sided) solves this problem better then text messaging. So really it evolved text messaging.

This is much like the quote by Henry Ford "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Ford was not "solving a real problem" -- the problem of transportation had already been solved since the dawn of time. He was evolving the solution to a faster, more convenient method.

Although this is true, I think it is missing the point. What was the problem text messages was trying to solve?

Responding to a phone call on a train during rush hour. Saying "I'm almost there", or "Ill be 5 minutes late" without getting dragged into a conversation in a crowded public space.

As an entrepreneur on the look for the most fertile soil, evolving an existing solution has the highest potential pay off. Plus the thought of frankensteining multiple existing technologies together brings a smile to my face every time.

There's an infinite variety of cool stuff we can build, but what will have the biggest payoff for my time now, what can I and my team members execute best on right this moment.

Yep it's that simple. I was in the "I don't get it" camp and then I read the example of Indian farmers at the market. They would use it to send messages to groups about seed prices and such at different markets using Twitter via SMS.

A lot of people understand SMS. Twitter is SMS on the web.

The other thing I think has made twitter more popular than it normally would have been is that it has been based in the positive. I can mark stuff as favorite, and I can follow people. I can't down-vote some tweet into oblivion. Harassing people is a little harder (you can block a person, but it is not listed publicly and it only affects your vision). Public categorization was not in the original design.

Now, we have lists. Most people are using them to make reading easier, but some are making lists with "less than kind" names and assigning people they don't like to them. I do wonder if that would have changed things if introduced earlier.

I always thought it was a little bit because the founders had quite a bit of pull in the hacker/startup community. What if Joe Blow had started a better Twitter a week earlier? How would he have advertised it and got penetration?

I'm not detracting from their success in building a valuable site, but I bet a lot depended on their connections in getting it adopted.

One thing that no one has mentioned yet.

The API.

Twitter embedded their product and users in hundreds (thousands?) of other applications. Without this coverage I doubt it would have been so successful.

Edit: I do recognise that there is a chicken / egg situation here. But I still stick with point.

Absolutely. Their reach would be downright tiny if we couldn't use Echofon on our iPhone, or tweet blog posts we find interesting with one click, with those pesky url-shorteners making it possible to share links.

It's the ecosystem, not just the product.

It does solve a real problem.

In order for people to maintain more than a few friends, it's nessasary for them to know what those friends are doing. If you have More than 100 friends/acquiantances, then talking to them say once a week or once a month is not time efficient.

Personal blogs and broadcast emails helped solve this problem, but the time taken to compose posts means that they are often infrequent and irregular.

Twitter (and Facebook) solved this by lowering the barrier to publishing by allowing it work from mobile and be short with no text formatting. Facebook was focused on a closed group of friends which left a gap for Twitter to target people who want publish to a wide number of people which includes very many people who have their own companies or otherwise see a lot of benefit from being well known.

I think Twitter executed well with the following:

- 140 character limit which forces people to be direct as non-professional writers tend to go on too long.

- Raising money early and therefore having a big team to build the product.

- API, this allowed massive innovation to happen outside twitter and to fill in the long tail of applications for this service in a way that no other site could match and they would have not been able to do internally.

- Keeping the product simple to use

- Publicity

"Why did Twitter succeed where Wave did not?"

Well, I can think of a few differences off the top of my head, 1) Twitter had to succeed, but Wave did not. Google will continue to thrive without Wave (in it's present form) 2) Unfortunately, Wave was over-hyped way too early. It's the same problem that the children of well-luminaries and famous artists have. The expectations on the kids are so high that even when they're "just" successful, they're considered a failure. 3) Twitter spawned a bunch of alternative clients early (because it was easy to come up with these alternatives). The User Experience is not one of Google's strength and it showed in spades in Wave. The Wave client was a out-the-lab capabilities demo ("dude, I can see every character you type in real-time"); it was not a UI. 4) The Wave federated backend and its protocol have not failed. It even has products by SAP and Novell based on it. In fact, I am hoping that now that the bright lights are off it, the real experimentation can start.

Twitter had time to create a base of early adopters, many of whom were also "influencers." They became the "value" that the rest of us came to check out and then strayed.

cheers -- matt perez

I think Colbert got to the heart of it, albeit facetiously:

"We exist, we exist, please, let this mean something"

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/26325...

He got to the heart of something, but it's not specific to Twitter.

1) What problem does Twitter solve?

I've been a big proponent of this methodology - build something people want, the product will have an inherent value.

However companies like Twitter and Zynga are proving that isn't the only methodology out there.

One could argue that Farmville + co solve the problem of "how do I entertain myself"/etc, but that's fairly contrived. Social/Casual games don't solve any problems and are popular mainly because they are addictive (in the same way roulette doesn't solve a problem but makes casinos a lot of money).

I started to tweet in 2006 when it was being pitched almost entirely as a "way to text lots of people" service. I thought that was a stupid idea but saw a lot of value in leaving lots of small messages over time to a) share what I'm doing in a "quicker than blogging" way, b) to use as a sort of diary later on in life, keeping track of where my days were going, and c) to publicly share tidbits of info too minor to blog about (like my travel arrangements, etc).

It turned out to be a lot more than that, but that's the promise I saw in it back then. People who like to rant on about never seeing the point of Twitter aren't "wrong" IMHO but they're clearly not ardent public communicators and don't see the value in being such.

Twitter.com is not a protocol, it is a service. I think it is also important to note that it isn't a public utility either.

right now it is dangerous to place all your eggs in a single basket. When you only have one service provider you lose control of things such as dependability, namespace, access, etc. These are things that most may be willing to let someone else provide for them, but some may want to control these and other aspects of microblogging. A federated design with multiple independent service providers would go a long way to help fix these shortcomings.

Everyone wants to be a blogger but most people are too stupid/lazy/without free time/uncreative to write long blog posts or to read them. In comes twitter and allows anyone to say stuff to the world with one sentence and terrible spelling and grammar. And it is not your fault that your spelling and grammar are terrible, it is practically a platform requirement.

In hind sight it is obvious why it is so popular. But it is one of these things that only make sense in hindsight. I am sure even the Twitter executives had no idea where it would lead.

Twitter worked because of psychology and marketing. It is essentially a game and reputation system in which the users add content to increase their followership. People use it for other things, of course, but it's this dynamic which drove famous people to adopt the platform, which then efficiently drove masses of others to adopt it as well. Twitter harnessed the marketing power of the world's celebrities by giving them an utterly simple and focused infrastructure for developing, communicating with, and measuring their public.

Twitter is a game in which score is follower count. All the actions a user can take to boost this score work to further enhance the value of the platform. Invite your friends, add useful content, publicize your twitter feed. Twitter brilliantly incentivizes its users to market the platform as they add to its value.

Facebook's basic structure is based on an undirected social graph which mirrors relationships between ordinary people. Twitter developed the undirected social graph which mirrors hierarchical relationships. This small change in structure generates the celebrity psychology. This is why CNN anchors and other media jumped on the platform - it gave them the ability to develop their audience, in the process they mentioned twitter every 5 minutes to their audience. It is fame-seeking psychology which creates a virtuous cycle (from Twitter's perspective, that is) that draws people into the platform.

Engineers will look at Twitter and think it worked because it offered a "fundamental new protocol", but that is only a tiny necessary condition for success. The road is littered with seemingly basic new ideas that never caught on. Remember when people were saying Google Wave was "fundamental" ... How'd that work out?

I think one of the biggest reasons for Twitter's success has been the users it attracts (in chronological order):

1. Geeks - were not put off by 140char limit, abstract usernames, @-syntax, and appreciated the openness of the API. Blogs like Techcrunch loved it because it is an extra distribution channel for their content = Huge media coverage in the tech media.

2. Celebrities/Media - It's ideally suited for this - in fact it could have been launched as a stand-alone product for celebs to communicate with their audience. Because celebrities were using it = heavy coverage in the mainstream media.

3. Social media types - because of the media coverage, and the usage of the above two groups, social media people began trumpeting that Twitter was/is something special = business taking an interest.

4. The rest of the world - I don't think we're at this stage, and I don't think we will be. It seems to me that most people use twitter to push their content - they aren't really engaged in a conversation, and following someone really means nothing. I don't know any 'normal' people who use Twitter. Every person I know uses Facebook.

1) Twitter represents the shift from the static web to the dynamic web (Web 2.0) to the real-time web.

2) "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." -- Henry Ford

3) It's a marketing channel for brands and a low friction communication channel for normals. Wave wasn't built for normals. Google doesn't understand the existence of normals.

I would suggest reading The Medium Is The Message by Marshal McLuhan. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25955.The_Medium_is_the_M... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_is_the_Massage http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25955.The_Medium_is_the_M... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media:_The_Extens...

I'm new to Twitter. Like you, I couldn't understand it's purpose, but it was recommended that I learn how to tweet in order to make myself more current during a job hunt. Then, I started using Twitter. Wow...the value is it's flexibility. I can use it in so many different ways. I should note, I don't tweet personal info or tweet with any friends. My tweets help me create a professional online persona for my job search, customize and organize (through lists) valuable online resources (much like a digitial recipe card box), connect with the ideas of innovators and newsmakers in areas of interest specific to me. The list goes on and on...The imposed brevity of a tweet is also a plus for busy professionals trying to share, market or search for unique ideas. I'm a converted skeptic of Twitter. I look forward to hearing the thoughts of others on this topic. Regards, "katmeis" on Twitter

Twitter is overrated, first of all. Secondly, I don't think we can say they've succeeded. They are the new hotness and probably will be for a couple more years, but they aren't profitable and their only money comes from investors enamored with the idea. They're just riding the hype train and soon it will be their stop.

Twitter enables a call to action in real time during crisis. It establishes an open,and global community, unlike facebook. On twitter you interact with people who stimulate and share common interests, and, at least, common motivation to see & learn more than what's in front of them.

Twitter succeeded when Wave did not; one, because it already established credibility and users already built a follow base they most likely didn't want to lose. Also, like Coca Cola, McDonalds, FedEx - they were the first, and established a new standard and brand loyalty.

Even William actually states that twitter began organically; he had no idea it would grow into what it is now. You can see him present here at a TED conference: Twitter Founder Evan Williams at TED 09 Video http://ow.ly/2svVE Great presentation!

Hope my 2 cents helped! :) esta

Twitter (and the Facebook stream) are both a convenient way to casually follow updates from your friends. To understand the need they fill think of what would be the alternative if they didn't exist. Email, chat, and RSS don't really fill that gap.

And yes, this is probably not the kind of thing that you plan. They probably came across it in the course of trying many different things and then realized how powerful it was. A lot of inventions happen that way. That's why I think Google's concept of lettings engineers use 20% of their time to experiment is brilliant.

Twitter grew big because they had two key components. Something that people wanted, and a really good growth channel which is when bloggers started promoting them on their blogs to get more followers. The third component they need to really succeed is a good business model.

My opinion on (3): I think you're overlooking the importance of sheer dumb luck. For entertainment products like Twitter, you have to somehow hook a core, influential audience. Then it takes marketing talent and more luck to expand into a mainstream audience. I don't think you can plan it, even with deep pockets (see Wave, Orkut, Buzz).

I don't use it nor understand the appeal, but I think of Twitter abstractly as an Internet-scale multicast message queue. You can blast any type of message out to a set of subscribers very quickly. That is a very interesting technology with potential value. It just happens to be used primarily as a chat application today. For example, you could trivially implement rssCloud on top of it.

1) Everyone wanted to blog, nobody took the time to read everyone's blogs, few invested the time to write blogs.

2) Absolutely. I would argue that most gigantic successes come out of having an inkling of what people want vs. being the outcome of a gigantic time R&D investment.

3) Simplicity - and this is the same reason that Wave didn't. If people are able to go from "I have no idea what this is" to "I know how to use this" in a weekend, as Leo Laporte often talks about, it won't die on the vine. You can go from rookie to I'm able to use this (note: this is different than "I get why I want to use this") on Twitter in under an hour - and enabling people's ADD is the best way to traction.

Twitter creates one of the best interfaces possible for a person to filter through messages. 140 characters is a big part of that, but I think profile pictures play a pretty serious role in that too. I can go through a massive number of tweets in a pretty short time. I see quickly who tweeted it, and I see any interesting keywords. This problem comes up in so many different areas, and it is a non-solution that works so well. The take away should be that the best way to filter a firehose of data for human consumption is to have a source indicator that is very quick for a person to parse, and a limited set of keywords.

The reason Twitter succeeded is because of the simplicity of the idea and design. It's simplicity allows it to be whatever the user needs it to be.

It can replace your RSS feed aggregator, your bookmarks, your facebook, your contacts on your cell-phone, etc., etc.

Features get added over time, but they're much more opt-in then opt-out. Meaning, you actively have to seek them out and use them; they're not forced on you. This means that the base product is still the same as it has always been; they're not, as 37 Signals would put it, dying with their user base.

In summary, Twitter serves many purposes and it does it in a fashion that it doesn't get in your way.

A Lot of people feel a need to say something and many feel a need to be heard. Twitter was a good solution, because it limited how much one can say. I doubt it was planned, But it seemed to have satisfied some psychological needs.

Some services lower the bars to entry- Twitter also lowered the ceiling.

Jack Dorsey: The 3 Keys to Twitter's Success http://the99percent.com/videos/6528/jack-dorsey-the-3-keys-t...

You must be new to the online world. Twitter is not new. It just brought what existed before to the Internet itself easily: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cb_simulator

The CompuServe marketers hated that service. They saw no reason for CompuServe to have it or to promote it. Meanwhile, back then, the online world was based on per-hour connect time charges and there were people who had bills of over a thousand dollars a month just from using that part of CompuServe.

So, maybe we can say one of the reasons that Twitter succeeded was that marketing was taken out of the hands of CompuServe marketers and their like and put the hands of bloggers and such?

NYT, Oprah and various celebrities did play a significant role in marketing Twitter in their later stages of high growth.

I had a CompuServe account but never spent much time on CB. I have been on chats, from Renegade BBS's on to IRC on to IM, for 20+ years. Twitter is not simply chat; it admits to persistant and semantically meaningful applications layered on top of it.

It's like a weird cross between NNTP and IRC, as I see it.

Yes, but the core aspect is the same, no matter the incarnation or revision: People like chatting with other people. The marketers couldn't quite understand that.

Can I ask another question:

Is twitter profitable yet? Has it a roadmap to profitability?

Twitter has 170 employees. Assuming fully loaded cost of 150 k that is approximate $ 30 mill pee annum

The google and bing deals are worth 50mill leaving 20mill to cover other costs like iron and bandwidth. My sense is clearly profitable. A

According to their "Team list" on Twitter they have 241 employees (http://twitter.com/twitter/team)

Twitter was in a position to succeed because they had the right timing. But twitter ultimately succeeded because of the cute factor of their name. It was fun to say and to coin variations of its predicate into other verbs. The segment of our population that doesn't understand twitter, by default, tend to make fun of it's narcissistic uselessness — and twitter was a name that already poked fun at itself; it didn't seem to take itself too seriously. Because of that, it was able to build a loyalty.

Because, sadly, people have egos. Everyone wants to be famous and reach thousands of others, even when what he's spreading is completely irrelevant. Twitter enables this for everyone.

People need nutrients, shelter, and a few creature comforts. Everything else in life is a frill. If all we did was solve problems, there would be no culture and no civilization.

The most important inventions are the ones that nobody "needs": rain dances, the bible, symphonies, television, the Internet. All those little problems that need solving are the gaps created by these frontiers. There are straightforward opportunities in those gaps, but don't expect to find the most successful ideas there.

Twitter solves many problems.

If you want just one, than "celebrity-fan communication" / "brand-consumer communication" is a good example. Twitter is really the leading solution in that area.

I think one reason it succeeded is that it fills a gap that was missing before in the online world: a simple way to communicate what was important to you no matter how trivial it is to everyone else. It also makes it easy to check what is going on without slogging through tons of pages.

I also think it was the extensible nature of Twitter. I wrote an article that highlights this: http://accentuate.me/blog/?p=46

Twitter succeeded because of the words people use on twitter the focus is like a laser when it comes to particulars. People choose to stay part of twitter and not just pull away from it what strikes them as meaningful as well. It shows that we all share a sense a communal culture that is not so selfish as to use the information and leave but it draws us to share how it affects us openly and efficiently.

wait. It's still not clear to me that Twitter has succeeded as a business. Are they making money? It's not clear to me yet that they are.

http://mashable.com/2009/12/21/twitter-is-already-profitable...

According to Bloomberg, the microblogging service will make a small profit this year off of $25 million in revenue, thanks to the search deals it completed with Google and Microsoft, which were reportedly worth $15 and $10 million, respectively. Those deals pay Twitter for access to tweets that are in turn included in real-time search results on each property.

I always felt that it was pushed and pushed by tech blogs as the next big thing, until it did become the next big thing. I opened an account in 07, I believe, and never really used it, but heard over and over again how important it was from sites like techcrunch. That and the fact that they allowed anyone to build on top of it

1. Twitter is RSS for the rest of us. To subscribe, you just click. No worries about which feedreader to use, no need for multiple feedreaders, no copy/paste of URLs.

2. Twitter is completely opt in.

3. Twitter got its timing right: People have very short attention spans and want immediate gratification. We have become a world of scanners (not readers).

Three things, which is the same thing, behind twitters success: Constant Updates of your so called "friends", our preoccupation with - what other people are saying, and getting news that relate to us - who is following me now? did anybody re-tweet my tweet etc.....

Early adoption was due to it being an extension to the IM Away messages. After that, especially after users started to use @x as a form of addressing, it basically became IRC 2.0, without the problems of installing IRC clients, having netsplits, being kicked, etc, etc.

-- MV

And most especially of having to keep connected all the time. Twitter is somewhat similar to web based IRC "in the cloud" but it also fills an important niche that IRC doesn't. IRC is an N to N broadcast medium with a finite number of channels. Twitter is an N to M broadcast medium with an effectively limitless number of channels.

Twitter legitimized and monetized spam.

Since you allegedly don't see messages from accounts you don't follow, spam is more socially acceptable.

In the extreme case, it's a platform for spam bots to subscribe to messages from other bots. We humans are just a small slice of the traffic. :)

Not every start up follows the solve a problem idea. Many that don't are the biggest and most popular on the net. Twiiter, Facebook are good examples.

What they provide are platforms that allow us to communicate and connect in unique, fun and more efficient ways.

I'll answer the business question - it's simple - Twitter makes money from the Twitter fire hose APIs and whitelisting privileges.

And these days, it seems twitter will purely survive from random #Bieber trends (yes, the tweens have found twitter it seems).

1) Good startup with a big idea 2) Anointed by The Tech Elite

Either one wouldn't have been enough.

I started twitter only because of the commands it offered..

follow @nick / leave @nick / dm @nick hi etc.

But the ability it provides in sharing things quickly and shortly & reading stuff shared by like minded people actually got me stuck in.

I think Twitter succeeded because it gave user only one action. All user has to do is type some text and press enter. Users essentially didn't have to think or even work to get comfortable with the system.

Computer games and marijuana also have a lot of the characteristics you mention.

Patterns of success and failure are a little different for businesses that provide value through entertainment.

Basically Twitter is a new hype. Print a t-shirt with a message e go around the world. Someone will read, someone dont. Who cares? You'll feel good anyway. @samuelefabbro

Spamming Facebook updates just wasn't right, so Twitter came up with a new protocol to do just that..

Because I can @famousPerson and sometimes they will RT me or @meBack.

More philosophically, it is a low-commitment communication protocol. Everything is expected to be a quick, throwaway 140 char response. So celebrities are willing to read your tweets and tweet you back, but they might not be willing to email you or take your phone call.

"What's new about twitter is that you don't specify the recipients. That is a real difference, and the right thing for some kinds of messages currently sent by email." - comment by pg

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515992

I only read this interesting discussion because I clicked a link from Twitter.

Enough said.

Because magic like TwitterArt #140Art happens, day in, day out.

http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/...

Because of #140ART #TWITTERART of course.

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