Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Users - NYTimes.com

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Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers

SAN FRANCISCO — Companies big and small monitor Twitter to find out what their customers like and what they want changed. Twitter does the same.

It started two years ago as a bare-bones service, offering little more than the ability to post 140-character messages. Then, it outsourced its idea generation to its users. The company watches how people use the service and which ideas catch on. Then its engineers turn the ideas into new features.

In the next several weeks, Twitter users will discover two new features, Lists and Retweets, that had the same user-generated beginnings.

“Twitter’s smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, ‘Gee, let’s not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let’s outsource design to them,’ ” said Eric von Hippel , head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. and author of the book “ Democratizing Innovation .”

Economists have long thought that producers — the people making products and running companies — are naturally the ones coming up with new ideas, Professor von Hippel said. In fact, he said, consumers often come up with ideas for products, and companies wait on the sidelines to see if they have mass appeal.

Technology companies have been the most active in relying on others to innovate for them. This is in large part because the Internet lets people exchange ideas easily and rapidly with large groups, and computing tools let people design new products cheaply.

The photo-sharing site Flickr started as a small part of a big online game. When the founders realized that the photo-sharing feature was more popular than the game, they scrapped the game and built Flickr. Open-source software companies leave innovation up to users, and companies ...

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/technology/internet/26twitter.html?th&emc=th

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/technology/internet/26twitter.html?th&emc=th