Steven Levy has an interesting article up on the Wired website “Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter”.
Levy’s story is about how a portion of the Twitter user base is helping to innovate and drive the platform forward. He covers things like retweets (“RT”) and hashtags (“#”). Levy’s article is hardly the first to point out the world that is Twitter, but it is an interesting read nonetheless.
As an early Twitter user, it has been really interesting to watch the platform evolve. Like many social platforms, Robert Scoble has been in the thick of it, helping to make people more aware of innovation.
From an entrepreneur’s perspective, having such an engaged group of users is about as good as it gets. Probably a two-edged sword sometimes (when you do something they don’t like) but a great way to innovate in the open.
Some other services (off the top of my head) that have had similar user “investment”:
- Flickr
- Gmail
- Friendfeed
Interestingly in the case of Friendfeed, the Facebook acquisition seems to have caused a big drop in traffic. The user investment level has dropped quite a bit; early adopters have left before the platform achieved more mainstream usage.