“One of the biggest reasons for Twitter’s growth and success is that the Twitter team allowed the service to be morphed and reshaped by the user-base from the very beginning. We saw it happen in the way that the Twitter community instituted replies, retweets, and #hashtags.

But the real kicker was the fact that Twitter released an open API for developers. That allowed programmers to extend Twitter in lots of directions and experiment with tools and utilities to improve Twitter.”

Read this article from Tech Republic.