[mililani]

Reading things like this kinda depresses me. I guess I just don't understand what makes things popular on the web. I mean, I would have never thought things like Twitter, Instagram, all of the various messaging apps would ever get this much traction. I think it's bizarre.

[mmxiii]

The mistake here is that you are conflating your subjective preference with reality. You are implicitly evaluating something against your own context, but to understand why twitter,etc are successful, you need to ask questions about what OTHER people value, and why they do it.

[enraged_camel]

It's worth noting that most popular web apps today started out as related but different ideas, and it wasn't always a result of some clear-cut vision. Twitter for example was a group SMS service and there was a lot of uncertainty about its actual purpose and utility, even among the founding team:

>>"With Twitter, it wasn't clear what it was. They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define, because it didn't replace anything. There was this path of discovery with something like that, where over time you figure out what it is. Twitter actually changed from what we thought it was in the beginning, which we described as status updates and a social utility. It is that, in part, but the insight we eventually came to was Twitter was really more of an information network than it is a social network." -Evan Williams

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#History

[gaius]

You say that, but it is the same as the dotcom days, everyone thought it was a "new economy", yadda yadda. Right now, ALL these investments are highly speculative. Any of these companies could do a MySpace overnight.

[ulfw]

Very much agreed. But think about it - even Myspace was only sold for a little over half a billion. We are orders of magnitude higher now. Holy bubble!

[tvhiggins]

switching cost for the users on all these platforms is essentially nothing, which would scare me off as an investor

[seanflyon]

Network effects can be significant. When I want to send out an event invite I use Facebook, not because I think it's better, but because it is what my friends use.