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

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.

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.

I'm hanging on to this one. :)

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It's the ecosystem, not just the product.

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

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

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

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

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).

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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).

-- MV

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. :)

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

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

Either one wouldn't have been enough.

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.

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

Enough said.