Twitter

Jack Dorsey Presents Twitter from biz stone on Vimeo.

First, that genuinely new ideas are, well, accidentally stumbled upon rather than sought out; second, that new ideas are by definition hard to explain to others, because words can express only what is already known; and third, that good ideas seem obvious in retrospect. So, having already had two accidental successes—one called Blogger, the other Twitter—Mr Williams is now trying to make accidents a regular occurrence for his company, called Obvious.

All of this has made Twitter the third “next big thing” in Silicon Valley in 2007—after the iPhone, Apple's innovative new mobile handset, and Facebook, a social-networking site.

And millions of people absolutely love it, twittering away throughout the day. Like all new and cool things, says Mr Williams, it's “experiential”. So it turns out that mums love to be notified on their mobile phones that their teenager is “eating an orange”. Colleagues appreciate that you are “running late” as they wait in the meeting room. Friends seeing that you are “having an espresso at Starbucks” might stop by. And a lot of people simply feel more connected by scavenging for conversational scraps from their friends. Source

# It's water-cooler chatter without the physical place of the water-cooler.

# Conversations can be seamlessly local (with people you know and see in the real world) and global (with people you only know online).

# Synchronous conversations can happen in real time without requiring synchronous attention.

# Conversations can adapt fluidly from one-to-one to one-to-many to many-to-many.