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Twitter Follows Users' Lead

Twitter itself is among a growing number of companies using the micro-blogging service to closely monitor what consumers are saying about their brands, products, and services in real time. It also watches how people use its service, and which ideas catch on, and then enlists its engineers to turn those popular behaviors into new features.

In the next several weeks, Twitter users will discover two new features, Lists and Retweets, that apparently had the same user-generated beginnings. As The Times explains, this strategy of following users' lead turns the classic top-down approach to product development on its head. Not surprisingly, technology companies have been the most active in relying on others to innovate for them -- in large part because the Web lets people exchange ideas easily and rapidly with large groups, and computing tools let people design new products cheaply.

Read the whole story at new York Times »

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