"Much of the early work on the Twitter Platform has been filling holes in the Twitter product. … Mobile clients come to mind. Photo sharing services come to mind. URL shorteners come to mind. Search comes to mind. Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience."
The Twitter Platform’s Inflection Point (via Fred Wilson on A VC)
I found this quote pretty interesting, as it goes against my argument in a graduate school paper I wrote on Twitter as a Complex Adaptive System.
The argument is that Twitter, knowingly or unknowingly, followed many of the lessons of Complex Adaptive Theory, primarily recognizing the emergence of features and behaviors in the user base and incorporating those into the platform experience. Specific examples are features like Retweet and @ replies.
So, the idea that Twitter had predetermined these “holes” and should have launched with all the current features of it’s ecosystem intrigues me. I would argue that Twitter has become so popular because it didn’t attempt to define itself and left that to the users.
