Twitter is so simple it is hard to imagine that it was ever confusing. But it was. What can we learn from that?
I learned to tweet from the microbook Tim O'Reilly wrote on the subject. It explained who used twitter, why they liked it, why it was limited to 140 characters and how one should accommodate this restriction.
Anymore you can't say 140 without everyone knowing what you are talking about. How did that happen? Was 140 a feature or a flaw? Does anyone even care anymore?
Twitter changes the rules every few days. They are a modern company and know how to do that. They also know that code is law in cyberspace and they are on the right side of the law.
Companies like Instagram discovered how to send pictures when text barely fit in 140 characters. That was big once. Now Twitter does the picture thing and Instagram is outlaw. People learn, if you want to tweet a long page, take a picture of it.
What do we learn from twitter?
We learn that if you want to sell widgets you had better be just like everyone else selling anything on the web. If you deviate anywhere you knock customers out of your funnel. But if you have something that rests outside other categories then you need to just let people find it and figure out how they exploit it. Then you exploit too.