Because they have a method of language usage which is tightly integrated into their UI and UE, but which can be stripped entirely out of both and evolves intuitively out of existing technological concepts as a supplementary technology.
To enter an SMS directly to a fellow user, you punch their username after a @ sign, so it would be
@yourname this is your message
Now, take that concept, and apply it with wexes, memetics and the viral spread of information, as filtered through this spam result scraped off my website some time ago, but just discovered by me.
It’s a page with a bunch of weird info about me being in NYC for Christmas last year.
Imagine I had embedded a Twitter-style @username into that message, though. Suddenly, you have a simple method of information transmission, re-transmission and distribution which works across multiple media, formats, frames and contexts. It’s a more indestructible meme, even if it uses what a search engine would probably rank as a shitty quality transmission media: spam blogs, and other low-life link structures.
For similar reasons, I think Wikipedia basically ended the dominance of a certain outmoded way of thinking about web search. Why search for vague phrases or quotes, when if you understand intuitively how information is organized on Wikipedia, you can essentially spontaneously come up with the appropriate URL without ever having to search at all. The retrieval method is built right into the language (which also uses many [[extra symbols]] and a new:style of coding.syntax as well).
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One Comment
@brainsturbator agrees #5GW Hash Tags are also quite nifty….aaaaand, Microformats, but I’ll talk about those over on the magnet post…you know, the language magnet pattern signal magnet.