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What they provide are platforms that allow us to communicate and connect in unique, fun and more efficient ways.
Solved a real problem: sending text messages to a group. Later, it allowed people to get semi-personal access to people they admire.
2) "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." -- Henry Ford
3) It's a marketing channel for brands and a low friction communication channel for normals. Wave wasn't built for normals. Google doesn't understand the existence of normals.
I would suggest reading The Medium Is The Message by Marshal McLuhan. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25955.The_Medium_is_the_M... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_is_the_Massage http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25955.The_Medium_is_the_M... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media:_The_Extens...
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Blogs existed well before twitter. Blogging also sends messages to nowhere.
Not guaranteed-short messages, collected in a merged timeline, with interruption (via SMS delivery) as a common/easy option. There is a dimension on which blogging and Twitter are similar. That's why they share a row in the table! But the added constraint, and the possibilities unleashed by that constraint, are a crucial part of Twitter's success.
The other major factors were simplicity (at a functional but also an API level) and the alignment of self interest with the digerati who in their quest for self-promotion became instantly addicted to Twitter's public follower numbers. Thus it became the topic of nearly every tech podcast for a good 12 months straight with sickening regularity.
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Not guaranteed-short messages, collected in a merged timeline, with interruption (via SMS delivery) as a common/easy option. There is a dimension on which blogging and Twitter are similar. That's why they share a row in the table! But the added constraint, and the possibilities unleashed by that constraint, are a crucial part of Twitter's success.
Blogs themselves aren't short but the RSS feeds for them usually are. Blogs + RSS roughly equals Blog + Twitter with link but for some reason Twitter took over from RSS/Atom.
Part of the reason is sitting right there in this sentence. You can't even bring yourself to call RSS "RSS", because the so-called "standard" has more forks than the devil's toolshed.
But the real reason RSS loses is that it's built on XML, and because nobody actually wants to look at XML a feed is read and written solely by computers, for whose convenience its design has been optimized. Twitter, on the other hand, is a protocol designed to be read and written directly by humans. It excludes all the ugly, verbose, oft-redundant tags and just delivers a message, which may contain an arbitrary number of #hashtags, @addresses, URLs, and blither in whatever order seems appropriate. The result feels human, instead of like the homework from a 1978 class on data processing. And it's really malleable: To invent a new way of Twittering all you have to do is type something and hope that enough of the audience can figure it out.
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Blogs themselves aren't short but the RSS feeds for them usually are. Blogs + RSS roughly equals Blog + Twitter with link but for some reason Twitter took over from RSS/Atom.
for some reason Twitter took over from RSS/Atom Part of the reason is sitting right there in this sentence. You can't even bring yourself to call RSS "RSS", because the so-called "standard" has more forks than the devil's toolshed. But the real reason RSS loses is that it's built on XML, and because nobody actually wants to look at XML a feed is read and written solely by computers, for whose convenience its design h…
Not really sure why you say that. RSS was pretty successful for a while - successful enough to get built into every browser and most email clients. End user consumers never saw the XML and the publishing side was usually built into blog software so neither did the publishers. I think this is not so much about XML but rather a more generic notion of simplicity - the whole concept of Twitter is so brain dead simple that it removes nearly all friction in adopting it. It's a much more general simplicity than just the encoding.
One thing that no one has mentioned yet. The API. Twitter embedded their product and users in hundreds (thousands?) of other applications. Without this coverage I doubt it would have been so successful. Edit: I do recognise that there is a chicken / egg situation here. But I still stick with point.
It's the ecosystem, not just the product.
Well, I can think of a few differences off the top of my head, 1) Twitter had to succeed, but Wave did not. Google will continue to thrive without Wave (in it's present form) 2) Unfortunately, Wave was over-hyped way too early. It's the same problem that the children of well-luminaries and famous artists have. The expectations on the kids are so high that even when they're "just" successful, they're considered a failure. 3) Twitter spawned a bunch of alternative clients early (because it was easy to come up with these alternatives). The User Experience is not one of Google's strength and it showed in spades in Wave. The Wave client was a out-the-lab capabilities demo ("dude, I can see every character you type in real-time"); it was not a UI. 4) The Wave federated backend and its protocol have not failed. It even has products by SAP and Novell based on it. In fact, I am hoping that now that the bright lights are off it, the real experimentation can start.
Twitter had time to create a base of early adopters, many of whom were also "influencers." They became the "value" that the rest of us came to check out and then strayed.
cheers -- matt perez