Ask HN: Why did Twitter succeed?

The other thing I think has made twitter more popular than it normally would have been is that it has been based in the positive. I can mark stuff as favorite, and I can follow people. I can't down-vote some tweet into oblivion. Harassing people is a little harder (you can block a person, but it is not listed publicly and it only affects your vision). Public categorization was not in the original design.

Now, we have lists. Most people are using them to make reading easier, but some are making lists with "less than kind" names and assigning people they don't like to them. I do wonder if that would have changed things if introduced earlier.

Either one wouldn't have been enough.

A quick, semi-personal connection between two people across a distance. This can further be boiled down as humans interest in connection and conversation.

It turns out that Twitter, due to the social network (both existing and being one sided) solves this problem better then text messaging. So really it evolved text messaging.

This is much like the quote by Henry Ford "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Ford was not "solving a real problem" -- the problem of transportation had already been solved since the dawn of time. He was evolving the solution to a faster, more convenient method.

It can replace your RSS feed aggregator, your bookmarks, your facebook, your contacts on your cell-phone, etc., etc.

Features get added over time, but they're much more opt-in then opt-out. Meaning, you actively have to seek them out and use them; they're not forced on you. This means that the base product is still the same as it has always been; they're not, as 37 Signals would put it, dying with their user base.

In summary, Twitter serves many purposes and it does it in a fashion that it doesn't get in your way.