The Web’s Jazz: Why Twitter Works – When It Does

Barring the odd DOS attack (which may have originated in Russia – what?), Twitter seems to be working just fine.  But why?  Beyond the hype, some of which can be attributed to the fact that nothing attracts a media circus like a media circus, what – if any – merit helps it achieve a level of popularity that draws a crowd in the first place?

It’s not that the notion of a status update is new.  That functionality is inherent to the even simplest forum software.  I think it’s more that that’s all that Twitter does.  And because it doesn’t do much, it can do almost anything.

Lemme ‘splain.

For years scientists have been trying to achieve artificial intelligence.  One of the approaches has been to model natural intelligence.  Look at the brain; see what it does; do the same thing with metal. 

A completely different approach (or mere variation, depending upon how you look at it) is to model simple brains – or systems where there seems to be no brain at all.  So instead of trying to build a human brain, you build something more like an ant brain that can’t really think so much as follow rules.  Very simple rules.  And very few rules. This tends to work out nicely for computer programmers since computer programs are, at their base, a list of rules.

Here’s the catch.  You make hundreds, even thousands of these little brains.  Each with only a few rules, maybe even the same rules.  Rules like "Walk until you hit something; then turn right."  And then you see what happens. (In that case, you get a robot that can draw rectangles.)

It’s called emergent behavior.  And it’s why I believe Twitter is so effective. 

Twitter only has a few rules: 

1. Let the user post no more than 140 characters. 

2. Let the user share that post with as many or as few other users as the user wishes.

and, most importantly…

3. Let any user under Twitter’s hood.

It’s kind of a mash-up of the two artificial intelligence approaches.  You’ve got one ant brain and a million human brains.  Because Twitter does one thing well and simply (and by simply I mean a friend of mine once tried to re-write Twitter from scratch using Ruby on Rails and it took him about 20 minutes) and opens it up to the world, it allows emergent behavior to, well, emerge.

So you go from a way for me to tell my friends what I had for lunch to a way for me to know which laundry machines are available in my dorm to a way for me to know what’s going on during a terrorist attack to a way for me to communicate with the outside world should I become paralyzed. 

It is the Web’s jazz.  You can riff on that melody for hours.