# Why Twitter is a big deal [2009]

Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/twitter.html
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Why-Twitter-is-a-big-deal-2009?index=0x648463eee371713ad682afa113d83bea007097f3a0f24bf70982040d752d43753ca81e7a
Submitted by macbudkowski.eth on 2023-06-10 UTC, 2 upvotes, 0 comments

## Summary

Paul Graham's essay argues that Twitter matters because it is a new messaging protocol in which the sender does not specify recipients, and new protocols that catch on are rare. He notes that TCP/IP, SMTP and HTTP are among the few commonly used protocols, and that Twitter is unusual in being owned by a private company. He suggests the founders' slowness to monetize may help it, since Twitter feels to users like earlier open protocols and its private ownership is easy to forget.

## Article

April 2009

Om Malik is the most recent of many people to ask why Twitter is such a big deal.

The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer.

Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an advantage. Because they haven't tried to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone like previous protocols. One forgets it's owned by a private company. That must have made it easier for Twitter to spread.