We wanted flying cars, instead we got was 140 characters - Peter Theil

“It can be used in clubs, for finding out what your friends are up to or what they’re listening to; it was great at Coachella.” That’s how Jack and Noah, the founders of Twitter, explained it to a DJ friend for the first time. A few weeks later, Twitter launched officially at a music festival in SF.

Born out of a hackathon, brought up as a micro-blogging platform, it’s somewhere between a social network and a replacement of text messages. Some people believed it could be the new e-mail. Like a Mark Rothko painting, it means different things to different people.

That’s the magic of Twitter.

Its story, right from inception to its IPO, has been a fascinating one. A lot has already been written about how Odeo became Twitter, so I will skip that part. Instead, what I want to talk about is Twitter, the product.

Twitter’s approach to product development should be a case study on how to build a true MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and how to listen to your customers continuously. Almost all the features that the product today offers are the features that early users somehow started using, and only later, Twitter productized them.

For example, Hashtags. I think hashtags became a thing first on Twitter, and later, other networks like Instagram etc. copied it. But even before it was a product feature on Twitter, it was the users who started using hashtags already.

Same was the case with @mentions. Twitter didn’t have @mentions but users started using it already and then Twitter built it.

and the same was true for retweets as well.

And so was the case with Tweetstorms.

Because of the 140 character limit, people would often break their long tweets into multiple parts as 1/10, 2/10, 3/10, and so on. Once enough people started using this paradigm, Twitter built it as a feature called threads. Over the years, this has led to some phenomenal tweetstorms. Here are a few examples.

How to get rich without getting lucky - https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936
On High Agency mindset - https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1276956836856393728
On Good Managers - https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1290685921348562948
On failures - https://twitter.com/warikoo/status/1299224547485417472
On mistakes with money - https://twitter.com/warikoo/status/1309359160077750272
On how to buy a health insurance - https://twitter.com/wiredmau5/status/1313718353370857477
On English language - https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1276669940565569536

I believe it is this way of product development that has led to a cult-like fan following amongst the relatively small user base (small compared to Facebook, but decently big in an absolute sense), which the likes of Facebook only could aspire to achieve.

But this eclectic mix of passionate users has also led to another unique challenge for Twitter: the product means different things to different users.

To some, it’s a way to keep up with what’s happening in the world; like a news channel. If you look at Trending hashtags, you can discover everything interesting happening worldwide, first on Twitter. You really don’t need 24x7 news anymore. Thanks to the internet and a 140 character box, everyone is a journalist now. If you would remember, Twitter was used actively in the Arab Spring of the 2010s. Journalists even gave the unrest in Tehran a second moniker: the “Twitter Revolution.”

To others, it’s a place where you could stalk celebs, though Instagram has fast taken that place, obviously due to it being a more photo/video-friendly platform. But most celebs have a Twitter handle where they actively engage with their followers. Like how President Obama announced his second term on Twitter even before his official addressed the country.

And to a vast majority, it’s a niche community of people so similar interests, thanks to hyper-personalization. These communities range from techies to art, to sports enthusiasts, to celebs, to revolutionaries, to the left-winged fanatics, the right-wing extremists, and whatnot.

But to me personally, Twitter is a university. It’s a place where you can connect with the best in the world and learn from them (we talked about this in one of the ROTW Live sessions, probably the one on education). The best part is that it’s all free. And you can learn anytime, anywhere and of course, at your own pace, about things that interest you.

To emphasize the last point, I recommend reading the tweetstorms I shared above; it’s a carefully chosen set. Each of them has more wisdom packed in them than what you would find in most books.

To give you more flavor, here is my list of people on Twitter with the best advice on -

Writing - @david_perell
Reading - @AlexAndBooks_
Business - @shl
Product Management - @shreyas
Marketing - @ThisIsSethsBlog
Growth - @andrewchen
Finance & Risk - @nntaleb
Life - @naval & @navalbot
Habits - @JamesClear
Design - @jackbutcher
Wisdom - @farnamstreet
Motivation - @ValaAfshar
Social Media - @tobydoyhowell

To me, Twitter is an intellectual social network.

There might be several challenges with Twitter as a business; there might be questions around its ability to survive and thrive in the world of modern social networks like Tiktok etc. But I feel Twitter is a unique social network built on top of tremendous product love and one that I am sincerely rooting for.

Quite simply, there is no place on the internet like Twitter.

Best,
Kaddy

PS - If you want to read a good book on Twitter, I recommend Biz Stone’s Things a Little Bird Told Me

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