While I don't necessarily agree that Twitter is marketing fluff, as you seem to suggest (although I would say it's somewhat overhyped but not as much as, say, Q

While I don't necessarily agree that Twitter is marketing fluff, as you seem to suggest (although I would say it's somewhat overhyped but not as much as, say, Quora), I will add this: At any particular time there is a Zeitgeist in Silicon Valley. Currently that Zeitgeist is "social". Anything remotely "social" gets hyped into orbit. What's more, you see companies playing into that. VCs/angels are interested in social... entrepreneurs will start "social" companies. A lot of these "Zeitgeist echoes" seem (at least to me) like they're built to get funding and built to flip. As such, the product is, at best, secondary. Instead you see the focus on getting publicity, getting stories written in TechCrunch, having the New York Times write about you, getting known for being hot amongst Valley insiders and so on. Thing is, almost none of this translates to the mass market. Twitter at least has some mass market appeal but (at least it seems to me) its use case is narrower than envisioned, largely limited in being a communication vehicle for celebrities to send short messages to a large number of people (rather than being a tool for mass status update distribution, which is more Facebook's sphere of influence). So I guess int hat respect it is like the movie analogy. Movies are clearly seen as products, almost a factory line in which you can put ingredients such as big-name stars, directors and writers and $100+ million and out comes a blockbuster. You also see this in hardware it occurs to me. Like all the Android tablets. Motorola etc seem to have no idea of what they're marketing or who they're marketing too. They're simply trying "shotgun marketing" and hoping something sticks. It seems like only Apple and a handful of others really have a coherent vision and strategy (agree with it or not).