> 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.
Twitter was an idea? The original "stat.us" idea was something like "Social SMS, to broadcast to your friends what you're up to as you go about your day." Jack Dorsey admitted that they had zero clue that Twitter would arrive where it has.
There was an article comparing the lack of innovation between Twitter and Facebook. One of its most salient insights was that Facebook's product was the vision of the founder, whereas Twitter was almost an accident, and thus there is a "don't screw it up" mentality at Twitter that limits product innovation.
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.
Of course it does, but he isn't the only one doing it anymore, and I suspect has a team of people at each company that assists and supports throughout the day, which was likely not the case in the very early days of twitter.
The required mental focus and energy to get one thing "off the ground" - past bootstrapped startup phase - is considerably different from keeping something going - and even growing - once it's hit an operational level that twitter has. I won't profess to know both sides from direct experience, but can see that they're not in the same place they were operationally/financially as they were 4 years ago.
OT: I was probably downvoted by someone who considers Twitter and Facebook as "startups".
No, but successful new ideas in the space are _relatively_ rare. Twitter itself ultimately acquired most of its features from third party apps, Tumblr, Pownce and other contemporaries, or just user behaviour (eg users invented retweets without any platform support); the _original_ Twitter was _very_ bare-bones.
So true. It's happened many times; most of the big companies today weren't the first to come up with the idea. I've yet to see someone successfully copy Twitter though :)
Oh man. You have GOT to have something more than an idea! Twitter is actually a great idea, but if they didn't have any skills in executing it then it never would have gotten big.
You have an idea. Great. There's nothing stopping someone else from having that idea. Execute the darn thing, even in a prototype form. Don't expect someone else to do the hard yards for you!
I think it probably would have. Twitter was originally started as a side incubator project within Odeo.com (it became obvious corp). Three guys, @noah, @jack, and @csshsh (florian) were working on it day and night. They basically lived at the office, focused on getting something working quickly, had a good set of ideas and some examples of how it could work. From initial idea to working prototype was just a few days. They even had a business model, which was thrown out, to make money via sms from the carriers. Later as it grew, not having a business model and focusing on the platform, tools, scaling, and community made more sense.
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."
> Looks like it's gonna be time for another round of "no, you can't write Facebook/Twitter in a week" again.
Certainly not today's Facebook or Twitter, no. But the initial versions were very simple things. Anyone can make a Facebook or Twitter. Not anyone can grow it to a userbase of hundreds of millions of users. That was what was special, not something technical. Scaling wasn't an issue; once you have investment and users, you just throw money at the problem.
I don't believe ideas are inherently good or bad. A lot also depends on timing and execution. Twitter turned out to be a great idea, but I don't think there are many people who could have pulled it off the way Jack Dorsey and his cohorts did.
The one difference is that twitter is embedded as an API now. Their lack of innovation leads to others innovating ON their platform not the innovators own.
I don't disagree. I think there will always be the next innovator/innovation and evolution of ideas but I think this differs and twitter has a strong hold because it is both a mind/marketing share that twitter owns, and a technology share inside of all the apps built on the API. It is the first big web communication platform that used the web friendly REST apis to explode. It was timing as much as simplicity. The complacency though is forcing others to innovate, on their platform, for them and not harming them currently.
I think friend feed has a fair shot. But I also think twitter has a certain style, design, culture that is hard to mimic and others aren't there yet.
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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