Ask HN: Why did Twitter succeed?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Can I ask another question:

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

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

Either one wouldn't have been enough.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

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...

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

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).

"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