Evan Williams's Twitter talk at TED

Twitter has a massive future...I just hope they continue to open up their API (public XMPP, etc.) so developers can tap into the ever growing resource!<p>I'm not a big fan of the billion webapps created everyday which uses Twitter in some way which doesn't dig deep under the skin of the ecosystem, I'm more interested in the fact that twitter is (or will become) a live database of everything happening in the world.

What's intriguing to me is that they started with less features. I'll explain. When some new thing comes onto the scene, like IRC or KaZaA or whatever, it is usually very shaped, the creators have a specific use patten in mind. And so they stock up on all the features that <i>they think you're going to want</i>. Twitter seems different (not using it myself). It comes with <i>less features</i>. And now, having listened to that talk, I can see that originally it came with no "features" whatsoever beyond the starter "hunch", a sort of an objectified idea.<p>That is what's worth a ponder, IMO.

My impression from the talk is that they still don't have any clue on what they've built.

Speaking of his experience with first blogger and now twitter: "I'd learned to follow hunches even though you can't necessarily justify them or know where they will go". Great take-away. I also thought it was interesting how the seeds for twitter had been a project Jack Dorsey had been apparently working on for a number of years.

Williams is right. Users will always find more creative ways of using your product than you can think of. The best thing to do is keep things open and stay out of their way. The other tech company I think is great at this is Mozilla.

Anyone else feel he still learning how to present. His presentation was well written, but he needs to practice his delivery.<p>In regards to not knowing what they have built, I think that's absolutely right. They built a platform for emergence. Its turned out wonderfully.