Why Twitter won

[   ux   tech   econ   ]            

I noted in a previous post the missing feature of consumer-side filtering in networks like Facebook and Google Plus. Twitter of course, has the same problem. I might follow hundreds of people, and all of their tweets are merged into a single timeline, with no rate-limiting or filtering of any kind.

It’s easy to look at a well-established application after the fact and note all the features it’s missing or things it could do better, but unlike Google, companies like Twitter can’t just sneakily solve the adoption problem for free by bundling it with existing services that tons of people use (even Google has had limited success with G+). Twitter actually had to drive adoption.

Creating a successful social network of any kind requires overcoming network effects–the service is more useful to you if people you care about also use it. If no one uses the service, it’s much less useful. This creates a very high barrier to entry and makes it difficult to get high adoption, even if your service is feature-for-feature better than the competition.

Twitter has a few ‘features’ that helped lead to its adoption:

• It’s free. Giving away your product is a strategy for overcoming network effects. There’s no downside to trying out the service, and if enough people try out the service at the same time, the service accumulates some beneficial network effects.
• It’s public by default. I can share my feed with others, http://twitter.com/pchiusano, without them having to necessarily be on Twitter. Related to this, Twitter initially supported consuming feeds via RSS, which eased adoption by integrating with the ‘legacy’ competition.
• The barriers to producing content on Twitter are as low as possible. With a blog, or a G+ post, or any other format in which posts are unbounded in length, creating content has a higher psychological barrier. This isn’t entirely rational, but placing the 140 character constraint means you ‘feel better’ about posting just a link to an article, or a quick thought or update. You could in theory do the same thing on your blog, but that is not the norm.
• They had asymmetric follow relationships at a time when Facebook still had only symmetric ‘friend’ relationships.

In particular, these last two items meant that Twitter had a real niche. As silly as the service must have seemed when pitched as an idea, it filled a niche, and had the right combination of features to drive its adoption. Much later on, Twitter solved some hard technical problems that made it a nice platform for sharing realtime updates, but this was Twitter merely executing well enough in the niche it carved out for itself, following its adoption strategy.

Was any of this intentional, or did Twitter just get lucky? I’d love to hear from some early-stage Twitter folks who were privy to its strategy discussions. For better or worse, Twitter is now the beneficiary of these network effects and competitors will have a difficult time displacing them.

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