It is very simple! You have only 140 characters to express yourself, what you are thinking, what you are doing or what is happening now! You can follow others and other users can follow you, you don't need to know each other at all! You can twitt through PC, SMS text or your mobile browser!
Twitter has gone from 2 million users in the beginning of 2008 to 32 million at the end of it and experts predict that it can easily achieve 50 million by the end of 2009. Many users have two accounts, one personal and one for business, as businesses start to appreciate the usefulness of the service.
A very important fact that contributes to twitter's growth is that it is simple and fast.
Its simplicity and restriction to 140 characters have led to innovations by users that professor Eric von Hippel calls it end-user innovation. Users created new ways for communicating and using the service. The most famous ones, @ for replying to twitts and hashtag both created by users and not twitter. The other one, real time search that can be a competitor for google for finding specific and accurate results or getting information at a specific moment. We can add to this about 11000 third party applications! Vast majority of users interact with the service through softwares created by third parties. There are a lot of applications for iPhone and Blackberry that have been developed by amateur developers or start ups. In Harvard Business Review blog you can read the Twitter's ten rules for radical innovators. And here seven examples of twitter innovations!
Social networks are usually vulnerable to changing taste of teens and people in 20s. It is possible that we move to next kind of social network in few years but the fundamentals of twitter will remain: following structure, link sharing and real time search. And these will have effect on our lives, businesses, politics and ...
Following presentation explains some of these impacts:
Twitter
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