Agreed. Pownce and FriendFeed were both hailed as Twitter competitors in the early days. In 2008 Twitter was consistently plagued by downtime as they had trouble scaling. However, the service was simple and easy to use and they did a great job getting early digital influencers and celebs onboard evangelizing the platform. When Twitter first got started they also had a suggested user list and recommended lots of famous people and digital influencers to follow. This created a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy - those on the list would evangelize twitter helping to funnel even more people in and boosting their own popularity, etc.

People thought twitter would fail to monetize so nobody wanted to copy something that had no idea how it could work either.

There was competition in the microblogging space and there still is, Twitter just had the "it" factor. People adopted it instead of other services. Developers adopted it instead of other services. The search features were better.

They just had the right mix of factors to beat everyone else.

It's less about the service and more about who's on the service.

On April 17, 2009, at 10:11 AM, Oprah Winfrey tweeted: "HI TWITTERS . THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY ."

And that was it.

Twitter servers started crashing every fifteen minutes. A piece of artwork known as the Fail Whale was a constant fixture preventing the rest of us from carrying on our early adopter conversations.

Then, other celebrities started taking it seriously.

Then, journalists started showing up.

There are a lot of other services that work like Twitter. Some of them are even free and open source. Some, like App.net, have paid membership levels.

They just don't have the same people on it as Twitter, and that makes all the difference.

Social media has changed how the business world operates. Twitter remains one of the most famous social media sites in the world and continues to grow at an accelerated pace. In fact, Twitter has now become a medium where one can launch their own brand and establish their business. Its other activity is its App Development which makes it convenient for its users to access the service through their mobile devices. Their maintenance of user data thereby protecting the privacy of those having legitimate accounts is also a valuable activity. Twitter’s first major resource is its own platform. It continues to evolve and adapt every year garnering the attention of new users along the way with its impressive reach. The Internet serves as the most important tool for Twitter to channel its services to its users. Access to its platform is of fundamental importance to its existence. It is used to secure more users and generate revenue every day.
Twitter’s revenue models tend to vary considering the constantly changing digital landscape. It amasses a generous amount of its revenue from its advertisements used mostly by companies and enterprises. Apart from the tweet itself, the entire Twitter account serves as a revenue generator for Twitter on its own level. Users scramble to click and participate in these hashtags thereby increasing more traffic for the site. This allows Twitter to accumulate more revenue for its website and thrive accordingly. Approximately 86 percent of total revenue comes from Advertisement. Many business models seek to increase their finances through advertisement, but only a handful like twitter or Uber have succeeded in doing so. The tweets it allows users to receive help these respective companies to reach out to a new customer and expand their base. Twitter users are exposed to different kinds of tweets on their feed. The point is to get more viewers and allow them to explore different ad campaigns for them to be marketed at an accelerated pace especially if they can go viral. This drives the viral element of the business and allows Twitter to become a marketing business entity of its own kind. Everything that trends online whether its entertainment, politics or business enters the hashtag section of Twitter. The more the users respond to whatever is trending online, the more they will be receptive to the product or service being offered. All promoted trends have their version of tweets that are in turn promoted by users. One viral tweet a day can cost 250,000 dollars in the US market.
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