How twitter began

When we were talking about information cascades and the rich-get-richer phenomenon in class and how Harry Potter may have just lucked into being such a popular book, I started thinking about how the social networking sites catch on. Who would have predicted when facebook started that it would become what it is today? How many sites similar to facebook tried to get a following and failed? Looking at twitter, it seems to me that this is a pretty random site to become so popular. Who wants to read mundane updates on other people's lives? And for that matter, who feels like what they do is important enough for others to read about it? However, it is clear that twitter has started morphing into something no one ever expected. It is a place where you can get breaking news even before CNN. When the plane crashed into the Hudson in January, the one of the first pictures used by the media was from a person who took a picture with their iphone and put it on twitter. Twitter has also become a place where companies can look to see if users have complaints about their products. It is a sounding board where people can say what they think and others can pick up those opinions and use them to help with marketing or for ideas about changes to certain products. Whatever the use of twitter will become, it is clear that if a few people didn't pick it up in the beginning and make it interesting enough for a few more people who then started down a path following the rich-get-ricehr phenomenon then twitter would never have gotten to the size that it is at today.

Here's an interesting article about what twitter has become: Twitter

I think its important to keep in mind that when we say "any [website,book, etc.] could of become popular", its not completely random which one does. After all, Harry Potter is at least to some degree more interesting/well written then other books, and similarly Twitter has some appeal (personally I don't see it) that other similar websites that it was "competing" with for popularity do not. So while yes, to some extent, Twitter became popular by chance, there's certainly more to it than that.