So, Twitter reached the grand-old age of five this week.
That practically makes it an octogenarian in digital-business terms.
Twitter's a bit of an odd beast really. We'll stop short of saying it was the first microblog, but it was the first to create a real ripple across the world's microblogging consciousness.
Before Twitter, there was the likes of Anarchaia.org, which was essentially a stream of consciousness consisting of links and bite-sized chunks of information. Such sites were colloquially known as tumblelogs, a nod-and-a-wink from Tumblr there we-thinks.
Following the Facebook model...
Facebook may be the world's number one social network now, but there was a much more gradual evolution towards the Facebook model, with the likes of MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn and Skype all helping to define what social networking was all about.
Facebook capitalised on these other social networks to build something unique, user-focused and - eventually - profitable. And there's no stopping Facebook now. So why won't Facebook go the way of Bebo and MySpace?
Well, the real power of social networks lies in everyone (or, at least, most people...) using the same platform. With over 600 million users across the globe, Facebook is past the point of no return. Even if a better platform comes along now, it's not practical for everyone to say 'right, let's move over to this other platform, spread ourselves around a little'.
We're seeing the same phenomena with Twitter. Rather than focusing too much on revenue, Twitter focused on its community of users first and foremost, this saw the platform rise rapidly and Twitter only recently started talking in terms of profit.
Its 2011 revenue has been estimated at $150m - triple last year's figure. Though its profit is still not likely to be much to write home about.
Twitter 'competition'
So why is there no Twitter competitors? The truth is, Twitter has had - and continues to have - a number of lower-profile competitors such as Plurk (big in Taiwan), Jaiku (owned by Google), identi.ca and many others. But are these platforms real competitors? Put it this way, we don't think Twitter is looking over its shoulder at them.
Tumblr is a slightly more sophisticated microblogging platform than Twitter. But it's more like a traditional blogging tool, a kind of stripped-down, simplified version of WordPress, where you can use your own domain name and post videos, images, links and, of course, text.
Tumblr is continuing to grow in popularity, but it's for a different type of user than Twitter. And even if Tumblr continues to snowball, it's not likely to steal users away from Twitter, there's plenty of room for both platforms to coexist peacefully.
Many social networks have microblogging functionality built-in to their interfaces - the humble 'status update' is a form of microblogging. But Twitter's simplicity is why it has the dedicated microblogging market sewn up - it spotted a niche in the social media market and got things right from the start.
There is space for niche, pockets of competition for sure, but Twitter has gained the critical mass of users to sustain its growth far beyond the 200m users it currently has.
