In a practical utility perspective Twitter was a pub/sub broadcast system in the social media space. It was slim, fast, and real time in a way the Facebook wasn’t, due to a 140 character limit. Yet, it never seemed to become more than 10% of Facebook and almost exclusively used only by people who were already heavy Facebook users.
I remember the optimism around Twitter in 2007 because it was immediately evident that it was addictive to certain personalities. Some people just had to broadcast absolutely everything they did, often irrationally. Most everyone else tried to find a use for Twitter but couldn’t. I know many early users that either abandoned or deleted their accounts before 2010.
Eventually it just became a text broadcast interface via their client. That is good for people who want to build a following, but nobody else found a use for it. In that regard YouTube is the Twitter replacement but YouTube had value otherwise that Twitter never could.
Not at all true, not just for myself (never was a heavy Facebook user, was a heavy Twitter user in the beginning), but for lots of people around me, especially fellow developers.
> Some people just had to broadcast absolutely everything they did, often irrationally.
Maybe we followed way different people, but I didn't see any of that stuff. Most of my feed was people launching projects, and technical discussions about various news/ideas.
> Most everyone else tried to find a use for Twitter but couldn’t. I know many early users that either abandoned or deleted their accounts before 2010.
Lots of governments found use for it seemingly, and the citizens. Various levels of government in Spain still sends out more information via Twitter+RSS than they do on their own websites, for some weird reason. And it's been like that for years now.
Fitting as well to use 2010 as an example, as that's right around when the Arab Spring was in full action, largely because of social media in general but particularly Twitter, which saw huge increases in user activity in the countries starting their revolts, where governments were scrambling to censor people yet Twitter remained available.
> Eventually it just became a text broadcast interface via their client. That is good for people who want to build a following, but nobody else found a use for it.
Yes, eventually Twitter became a pipe to push data through, but they didn't like that so they slowly killed the API by making a bunch of weird moves about it and shutting down 3rd party clients. Eventually, the only people left on the platform were people chasing followers, rather than people chasing stimulating conversations, which is what I got out of Twitter when I used it more.
It’s also completely unreplicable today. There was a fun factor to it that justified starting out at zero followers—it was a game, so it was OK to start out at level 1–that isn’t there on any of the replacements. “Platform” has become some new kind of social credit score and no one enjoys it anymore. We either become “content creators” and get into that grind or remain obscure and hope our employers never bother to deanonymize us.
Just because it didn’t become SMS or reach Facebook scale doesn’t mean he was wrong.
The way nearly all sizable organizations think about public communication includes Twitter and it’s the de facto support channel for several industries.
Did you mean RCS instead of RSS? I can see it going either way.
So what changed? Why did twitter eventually become so popular?
Some like Twitter better, others like facebook better. It's just different ambience.
Twitter / X punches above its weight (in terms of regular metrics like MAUs and revenue) in terms of cultural impact. One can argue that it was responsible for delivering the 2024 election to Trump. This may have never happened if its original founders had tried to control and monetize it too soon.
I think you've missed his point. He doesn't mean a technical protocol, he means a conceptual one.
Perception around Twitter in the late 2000s and early 2010s was completely different to what it was today or 5 years ago.
I remember the tech buzz around Twitter where every VC considered it the next big thing because everyone they knew was on Twitter. It was a really classic case of "bubble think" (to me).
Twitter has never gone mainstream. It's used as a system for press releases, journalists and a few other niches. I really wonder if the journalism niche will dry up given the security concerns of who can read their DMs but that hasn't happened yet.