The Power of Twitter and Emergent Technology
Twitter has been a wonderful tool and surprisingly fun and viral piece of technology. It's caught the world by storm, inserted itself into the world's lexicon and caused politicians to start pretending they even know what it is.
Twitter, itself, however is not a complicated piece of technology, nor an incredibly original idea. In fact, Twitter's power and popularity are the result of the ideas and ingenuity of its user base - not its developers.
The concept of Twitter was to have an application where you could tell your friend what you were doing at that moment. It was almost a slow group instant messenger if you will - or even a limited public message board. There was nothing drastically impressive about the system. Even the idea of using an SMS shortcode to post to the web site and receive updates wasn't a new idea. In fact, in its heyday, Twitter was best known for developer Alex Payne's complaints about Ruby of Rails' handling (or lack thereof) of multiple databases.
No, the power of Twitter did not come from the company or the application itself. The power of Twitter came from the emergent technology that started to be developed around it.
Think about it. Three of the most important features on Twitter today are the result of user usage and not the company. The "@" user identifier, the "#" hashtag mechanism and the Twitter search were all thought up and/or developed outside of Twitter and later incorporated into the company and core feature set.
That's not the end of it though. Look at things like TwitPic, Blip.fm and Song.ly. These are web applications that filled a vacant niche in the Twitter users experience for things like photos and music - but it doesn't stop with the web. Twitter's robust API has allowed for the creation of desktop and mobile phone applications that have become so popular that most of the people I know that use Twitter rarely even go to the Twitter web site. Fully-featured mobile applications like Twittelator Pro for the iPhone have all but made the SMS portion of the Twitter feature set obsolete; and with more and more "smart" phones being created that allow for custom applications, you'll more than likely see the SMS feature fade out forever, while more functionality and interconnectedness gets pumped into the mobile space.
I was never a Twitter power user until I discovered Spaz - an Adobe AIR desktop application that interfaced with Twitter. In fact, Spaz was one of the first applications I saw that linked hashtags to the Twitter search, so that with one click you could see a search stream of items attached to that tag. This was almost a full year before Twitter started doing it on their own web site.
Then, from the use of Twittelator Pro, I started to incorporate more music and image posts into my tweets thanks to the integration with Twitter image sites and playback integration with Song.ly links.
To this day, the most important aspect of Twitter is the ability to perform a real time search. When my iPhone updated to the 3.0 OS and then failed to activate (leaving me with an expensive paperweight), the first thing I did was search Twitter to see if anyone else was having this problem. In the past, you would have to find yourself an active message board and hope people would respond. Now you get immediate gratification - all of this from something that a different company (Summize) created before being bought by Twitter.
Twitter is the best example of an evolutionary software development process at work. They started with a small set of features, released it to the public and then listened to their users. From simply listening and watching they've incorporated the best of user ingenuity into their own application and created a highly successful company in the process.
