There's no doubt it's overhyped, but there's also no doubt that, rightly or not, it's making a huge impact. In fact, I think it's a fascinating case study in h

There's no doubt it's overhyped, but there's also no doubt that, rightly or not, it's making a huge impact. In fact, I think it's a fascinating case study in how the most horribly implemented and feature deprived technologies are sometimes the most successful. IMHO, the one and only thing they did right, and which made all the difference, was to implement SMS as a gateway. This made it possible for everyone to use twitter before actual twitter clients existed. And ironically this in turn forced them to make the service completely feature deprived - bizarrely short length, no links, no images, no formatting in messages ... If someone had proposed it to me I would have immediately said they needed a richer client - how could they start so far behind what everyone already expected from a simple IM client? Well, I think it was exactly that which actually drove the success of the whole thing.