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Steven Levy

The breakthrough that enabled Twitter to become the wildly successful service it is now came from a twist that was much more significant than even its founders knew: They made it possible to “follow” someone’s messages without requiring permission. Essentially you would take out a subscription to someone’s Twitter stream. You would follow your best friend or your brother in the same way you would follow Barack Obama, DeSean Jackson or the New York Times. This was a break from the traditional two-way agreement that ruled communications in previous social systems. This changed Twitter from an asynchronous instant messaging system into a hybrid of a social network and broadcast medium.

But what if you wanted to have a truly private conversation, as with SMS or e-mail, with someone on Twitter? This presented a problem to those with a huge following.

Direct, private messages could only be sent to someone who followed you. The fact that you followed someone meant that you’d probably be happy to hear from him or her. To have a back-and-forth conversation, then, both parties would have to be following each other.
These settings helped make Twitter catnip for loquacious politicians like Anthony Weiner, who used it to establish his feisty personality with a nationwide community. But it also proved his undoing when he misused Twitter for sordid sexual contact with women. Read the whole of Steven Levy's article at Wired   >> Tweet

Image by Tony the Misfit, licensed under Creative Commons .

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