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Comment by k3n | Hacker News Reader

Conversely, this has always been my complaint against the general hoopla and bandwagonning around Twitter -- they didn't do anything technically innovative. When they first started generating buzz, I instantly thought, "Oh, did they create a new messaging protocol that is universally accessible, redundant and easy to use? That's killer!" But, that was not the case.

Yes, they had a good idea and executed very well, but as I see it, Twitter is nothing more than your run-of-the-mill 4chan board. I still don't understand the draw, but then again, there's a lot of facets of modern society that I simply have no explanation for (reality tv?!?) and have been better off not worrying about it further.

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99,9% of people doesn't care at all about how technically innovative something is, they only care about how useful it is. And Twitter is incredibly useful.

"Incredibly useful" would imply that if you told me about Twitter, I wouldn't believe you. As much as I wish it were otherwise, it's not that hard to believe that someone invented IRC over HTTP and gave it a silly name.

Many people, myself included, were skeptical of the value of Twitter until they used it. In that sense, we literally did not believe how useful Twitter was. Also, Twitter is almost nothing like IRC in any respect other than being an electronic communication medium.

> Many people, myself included, were skeptical of the value of Twitter until they used it.

I'm still skeptical and I have used it.

I think that's okay. He said Many, not Everyone. Right?

People don't expect "incredible" to mean "not credible" anymore.

That's literally the most awesome thing I've read today, for all intensive purposes!

..... for all intents and purposes.

Christ, enough with the pedantry.

If it once was "credible" but no longer is, perhaps a more appropriate term is "uncredible" or "decredible".

Of course, that woudl imply that the act of removing credibility from something would be "decrediblizaiton" or "decredencing".

Christ, enough with the pedantry. I'm getting sick of all the pedants on HN critiquing idioms and common phrases.

Did you understand what the GP meant? Yes. Did you need to point out to the world your complete mastery of the English language? No.

The GP's point was that Twitter is useful, despite it's relatively low score on "innovative new technology" scale.

Well, it's not incredibly useful right now, and it would be had it been a single node and not the entire damned thing.

People like to chat with other people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cb_simulator

Oh, did they create a new messaging protocol that is universally accessible, redundant and easy to use?

Something the vast majority of people couldn't care less about. Twitter has, in effect, created a new messaging protocol, in the broadest sense of it. It's accessible on your computer, your phone, even your TV if you try hard enough. It's integrated with hundreds of apps and sites. Technically speaking it isn't doing anything particularly amazing (although the sheer scale they deal with is), but that's not really the point.

> It's accessible on your computer, your phone, even your TV if you try hard enough.

Note the irony of this comment existing in a post about the service not being accessible, anywhere. Which wouldn't be the case had it been a protocol.

A massively decentralised protocol would not exactly be the model of reliability, either. I'm not even sure how that could possibly work in a service like Twitter.

It would probably work like an IRC network. A network might involve hundreds of servers, but you only notice which server another person is using when there's a netsplit. Split users can reconnect using another server and rejoin the channel with only a slight interruption.

An IRC-styled Twitter would need some sort of synchronization service to handle twitsplits.

Has email ever been down, like, everywhere?

If you think of it like e-mail, who runs the equivalent of the e-mail servers? Your ISP?

Once the user base is big enough, that's the main draw.

Right, Twitter's main feature isn't the messaging, it's the namespace.

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