Response to Anna Murphy's Blog
In Anna's blog, she talks about how the hashtag was core to Twitter's success as an app. And perhaps that is true, to some extent, but it was not actually an original concept of Twitter's.
The usage of the hashtag in social media groups is actually credited to a man named Chris Messina, who was an early user of Twitter. He wanted a way of organizing groups on the app, so he pitched the idea to the company, who initially rejected the idea for being too "nerdy". It wasn't until the hashtag caught on among Twitter users (in a grassroots movement started by Chris) that the company caved and added the feature. [Source]
The hashtag might have been a feature that eventually helped Twitter reach its current status, but it wasn't there since it's inception. Instead, I would argue that the real innovation of Twitter was the 140-character limit. A tremendous part of what makes or breaks a social media app is its community and its "vibe," so to speak. A similar existing app with some popularity was Facebook, but Facebook featured longer-form posts. What Twitter's 140-character limit did was make the environment faster-paced. There's a reason we "live tweet" our reactions, but we don't really "live post" something on Facebook. If we only have 140 characters, we're mostly limited to exactly that - our reactions. We can't tell everyone about what we've been doing for the past few months, only what ran through our heads a moment ago.And that, I believe, gets right to the heart of what makes social media popular. People like to use social media to stay updated on the world and on their friends, and the faster those updates are, the better.