When Jonathan Ross (@wossy) discusses Twitter with Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) on Friday night telly you know that Twitter is going mainstream.
Indeed Hitwise’s new figures suggest that Twitter use in the UK has risen ten-fold in the last year - making it one of the top 300 websites in the UK.
So what can aspiring entrepreneurs - especially those in the tech and web 2.0 arenas - learn from Twitter?
Certainly simple is good - Twitter is easy to explain and has limited functionality. Not everyone might grasp ‘why’ you might want to spend your days tweeting away but a simple idea makes Twitter easy to share.
Network effects make a big difference too. The more people who use Twitter, the more useful Twitter becomes, and the more people who will use it.
If you’re building a community, Twitter also teaches us to ‘get the hell out of the way‘ - the founders of Twitter are surprisingly uninvolved in what goes on in the twitterverse. They let people use it however they like and make it simple for developers to build new apps and businesses around Twitter.
To those points I’d also add customisation as a key factor - and competition. There’s certainly an element of Twitter users determined to attract as many followers as possible - and beat everyone else.
Perhaps it’s too simplistic to think that you could design a Twitter-like business - much of what has happened is surely as much a happy surprise to the founders as anyone.
But, as social media becomes more mainstream - from blogs, to Facebook to Twittering on the BBC - smart entrepreneurs are using the lessons learned from the successes (and failures) to help develop their own products and services.
