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.
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.