> Twitter's original win was that it was staggeringly simple, just asking new users to post about 'what they're doing right now' and offering simple controls to reply, repeat, or express approval
Twitter originally was even simpler than that! Replies were just new tweets prefixed with “@user” and retweets were just copies of the source tweet prefixed with “RT: “. As these conventions arose Twitter eventually turned them into first class features. Also it was originally named “Twttr”, though that didn’t last too long.
Edit: and you mainly searched on hash tags (#tags) since full-text search wasn't very far along. Amusingly their search index on hash tags worked a bit like hash tables! Though I assume that’s entirely a coincidence.
> Twitter's original win was that it was staggeringly simple, just asking new users to post about 'what they're doing right now' and offering simple controls to reply, repeat, or express approval
Twitter originally was even simpler than that! Replies were just new tweets prefixed with “@user” and retweets were just copies of the source tweet prefixed with “RT: “. As these conventions arose Twitter eventually turned them into first class features. Also it was originally named “Twttr”, though that didn’t last too long.
Edit: and you mainly searched on hash tags (#tags) since full-text search wasn't very far along. Amusingly their search index on hash tags worked a bit like hash tables! Though I assume that’s entirely a coincidence.