By "Twitter was built on use-case X", I meant "Twitter built up most of its early user-base by doing X, and became popular because of X", not "Twitter was conceived in hopes that it would work for X."
I don't think these things are mutually exclusive.
Twitter didn't really know what problem they were solving. They may be a bit of a special case. But they built something they felt was usable and launched it.
If you look at the Twitter launch at SXSW it was all about where people were going and how the band was. It fit very well into that model.
At the time, twitter didn't have search, they didn't even build their own search, somebody else did (summize) and Twitter bought them. They didn't know about trending, they didn't know that business would make up the bulk of their publishers (my suspicion, correct me if I'm wrong). They didn't know that the majority of their revenue would come from selling access to the firehose of real-time data.
So, you have to build for the now, and you have to respond to the future.
Facebook wouldn't be what it is today if they had just built for their 'now' which was initially putting the college facebook online. They did that, and kept iterating for the future.
Both examples actually re-enforce my argument because when they started they were all about delivering value to their end-users. Yes, twitter exposed an API really early on, but their focus was delivering on the end user promise of short messages.
Facebook did not add an API until much later and "being a platform" did not become a priority until recently.
>Twitter succeeded because it was a dumb, open pipe that developers made awesome apps for. Twitter is now acting like they don't have developers to thank for their success.
Succeeded as in "they got lots of users". Not succeeded as in "they made lots of money".
Twitter mostly cares for the second, it's not a non profit service.
Twitter was obviously a great idea, but it wasn't an obviously great idea.
Just because no one (including the Twitter guys) could see the direction it would grow in doesn't mean that it wasn't a great place to start. In retrospect, clearly it was.
There's a huge difference between founding a company on a vision of being a utility for developers and attempting to fulfill all the promise that Twitter had in the early days, versus the actual Twitter where they never really figured out what they were doing and scaled out to require such levels of investment that the grown ups inevitably moved in and started cannibalizing it for cash.
> comparisons to fb might not be completely accurate since one of the founders, apparently had the idea for twitter when folks were updating their IM clients.
I had the idea for twitter back in 1998, but I didn't do anything with it, neither did the founder of facebook... Ideas mean nothing without execution.
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