Re:Ask YC: Do you believe in Twitter philosophy?
by akkartik on Tuesday March 18, 2008 @12:20AM
(#139550)
When you see the one textbox on the twitter page, the 140-character limit, one's first reaction is to think twitter is something trivial. Resist this tempting line of thought. Twitter isn't trivial. It is status messages, yes, just like IM. However:
a) Past statuses get archived. Each of them gets a permalink. You get RSS on them. There's a huge difference between just seeing what someone's doing right now, and being able to see a concise summary of their day or days laid out before you.
b) You can access it via mobile phones.
c) It is a social network. You can discover interesting people by clicking around.
d) You can follow others. This one is so huge I'm certain I still haven't grasped all of its implications. Twitter is a social network built on a single simple one-way connection, and already there's more value flowing through it than through facebook.
When I go to facebook I get spammed and poked and bitten and humped and god knows what else. Facebook is made for senders. When I go to twitter I can get a sense of what my close friends and family are up to, no matter where on earth they are, so that when I do open up my IM window to chat with them I don't have to start with the tedious "how was your day?" I have prebuilt objects to begin a conversation with. Twitter is built for recipients.
a) Past statuses get archived. Each of them gets a permalink. You get RSS on them. There's a huge difference between just seeing what someone's doing right now, and being able to see a concise summary of their day or days laid out before you.
b) You can access it via mobile phones.
c) It is a social network. You can discover interesting people by clicking around.
d) You can follow others. This one is so huge I'm certain I still haven't grasped all of its implications. Twitter is a social network built on a single simple one-way connection, and already there's more value flowing through it than through facebook.
When I go to facebook I get spammed and poked and bitten and humped and god knows what else. Facebook is made for senders. When I go to twitter I can get a sense of what my close friends and family are up to, no matter where on earth they are, so that when I do open up my IM window to chat with them I don't have to start with the tedious "how was your day?" I have prebuilt objects to begin a conversation with. Twitter is built for recipients.