This evening I passed the 500 follower mark on Twitter. The lucky (?!) 500th person was @soyleslie - an interesting young woman on the other side of the planet.
Way back in the distant past, I joined Twitter (which was buggy, and went down almost every day) along with Pownce, Identica, and Jaiku - in the spirit of “trying things out”. It’s perhaps worth noting that these were the days before we had the children, and had something vaguely resembling free time.
Identica pretty much died a death when Twitter became stable.
Pownce died because nobody knew about it (which was a shame - it was good)
Jaiku died because Google bought it for the technology - not the service.
Twitter was always the elephant in the room. Always the heavyweight. Always the flawed service that everybody using it complained about, and yet returned to following the numerous outages.
Why did Twitter survive, and win? Perhaps because it never tried to do anything more than messaging - every other service tried to “add value” - heaping on various layers of toys and doodads. While explaining Twitter to a friend the other night, I emphasised the one virtue it has - simplicity - and that it trumped any virtue held by all other similar services.
Twitter survives because it is simple. Just like bacteria.
And yes, the implied meaning of the last statement was intentional.