Twitter worked because of psychology and marketing. It is essentially a game and reputation system in which the users add content to increase their followership

Twitter worked because of psychology and marketing. It is essentially a game and reputation system in which the users add content to increase their followership. People use it for other things, of course, but it's this dynamic which drove famous people to adopt the platform, which then efficiently drove masses of others to adopt it as well. Twitter harnessed the marketing power of the world's celebrities by giving them an utterly simple and focused infrastructure for developing, communicating with, and measuring their public. Twitter is a game in which score is follower count. All the actions a user can take to boost this score work to further enhance the value of the platform. Invite your friends, add useful content, publicize your twitter feed. Twitter brilliantly incentivizes its users to market the platform as they add to its value. Facebook's basic structure is based on an undirected social graph which mirrors relationships between ordinary people. Twitter developed the undirected social graph which mirrors hierarchical relationships. This small change in structure generates the celebrity psychology. This is why CNN anchors and other media jumped on the platform - it gave them the ability to develop their audience, in the process they mentioned twitter every 5 minutes to their audience. It is fame-seeking psychology which creates a virtuous cycle (from Twitter's perspective, that is) that draws people into the platform. Engineers will look at Twitter and think it worked because it offered a "fundamental new protocol", but that is only a tiny necessary condition for success. The road is littered with seemingly basic new ideas that never caught on. Remember when people were saying Google Wave was "fundamental" ... How'd that work out?