Listening and Learning from your Customers - Twittovation

As reported by Reveries - Cool News of the Day:

There was a time when Twitter's founders objected to users referring to their posts as "Tweets," reports @claireCM in the New York Times (10/26/09). Those days ended just a few months ago, when Twitter "applied for a trademark on the term." That's just one of the many ways in which Twitter has followed its followers. "Twitter's smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, 'Gee, let's not try to compete with our users ... let's outsource design to them," says Eric von Hippel, author of Democratizing Innovation.

Twitter ceo Evan Williams agrees: "Most companies or services on the web start with wrong assumptions about what they are and what they're for," he says. "Twitter struck an interesting balance of flexibility and malleability that allowed users to invent uses for it that weren't anticipated." Among other things, Twitter users invented the idea of putting the @ symbol before their user names (e.g., @cool_news). They also picked up the idea of using the # symbol to categorize topics -- another innovation Twitter initially resisted.

The # idea came from open-source advocate @chrismessina, who says Twitter thought the # concept was too nerdy for mass appeal. Well, now Twitter "hyperlinks the hash tags so readers can click and see all the other posts on a topic." Twitter is now also about to formalize the RT, or "retweet," feature, which users have long used to "send a post by another Twitter user to their own set of followers." Evan Williams says Twitter's plan is to keep following its followers. "You get a bunch of users interacting and it's hard to predict what they're going to do," he says. "We say, 'Why are people using this and how could we make that better?'"