Title: Hi HN,<p>I've never really understood Twitter as a business, and so I figure that since it's been bugging me for a good two years now, I'd might as well give it a shot and ask the good folks here for their thoughts on this. Any insight is appreciated.<p>1) What problem does Twitter solve? Some of the best startups are created around specific solutions to specific problems. Twitter is a non-specific solution to a whole host of problems. It is used differently by different kinds of people. So ... what problem does it <i>really</i> solve? Or is there no specific problem here, and we just have a communal itch that we want to scratch that the Twitter format helps?<p>2) YC tells its applicants: 'make something people want'. But while Twitter does make something people want, it's not clear what that is. Could Twitter be an example of stumbling, by pure accident, into something people want? Does this imply that there is no way to <i>intentionally</i> create a company like Twitter?<p>3) Why is Twitter so successful? Twitter seems to be the only company with no <i>clear</i> value proposition (I'm not saying there's no value - I'm just saying that it's hard to explain what that value is to a non-Twitter user); also it seems to be one of the few startups that can get away with producing a generalized platform as its main product. Wave didn't. Why did Twitter succeed where Wave did not?<p>Thoughts, ideas, and observations are all welcomed.
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