Happy Days is one of the most successful and iconic sitcoms of all time. This idealized portrayal of life in the ’50s and ’60s ran from 1974 to 1984. It gave us the Fonz, the term “jumping the shark”, and a bevy of spin-off series. In fact, few shows have had as much success in spinning off other hit shows as Happy Days.

The shows Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy each had successful runs and launched the careers of Penny Marshall and Robin Williams respectively. Then there was Joani Loves Chachi and the less successful career of ’80s teen idol Scott Baio. In each case, the main characters were introduced and developed on Happy Days. Audiences got to know them. Producers undoubtedly tested them for breakout potential, and the spin-off shows debuted with built-in familiarity. By and large, the same phenomenon is happening with Twitter.

Yes indeed, Twitter will be remembered not only for its own success but for that of so many successful spin-offs including Foursquare, Gowalla, Plancast, GetGlue, and Foodspotting to name a few. To be clear, we are not referring to the cottage industry of companies built on the Twitter platform such as TwitPic, TweetDeck, or TweetUp. These are part of the broader Twitter ecosystem. They’re part of the main show. The companies we have in mind are entirely independent of Twitter but were spun off based on the behaviors Twitter pioneered and made popular.

How is this possible? Well, the Twitter platform is as simple as it is brilliant. It appeals to our narcissistic tendencies. It is the lowest common denominator for most of the connected universe, a place to voice our opinions and potentially have them affirmed. It’s a place to vent and promote and seek acceptance. It’s no wonder how successful it’s become nor how much influence it’s had on how people use Facebook. The problem is that the Twitter platform (nay, the Twitter experience) is a mile wide and an inch deep. It does so much in terms of sharing and linking information that it’s impossible for Twitter to satisfy our deeper needs—to satisfy every narcissistic niche, if you will. It simply lacks the features and infrastructure. So quite naturally, new companies have responded to the demand. Here are five that fit the bill.

Foursquare and Gowalla

Before there was Foursquare and Gowalla there were tweets about your current location. Isn’t that what a checkin is? It’s a tweet about where you are at the moment, yes? If you tweet that you’re at the Starbucks on Main Street, those who (a) know you, (b) follow you, and/or (c) live near you will know exactly where you are. They certainly don’t need a map, and you never needed a badge or mayorship to prompt this type of tweeting. It followed naturally from the question, “What are you doing?” The problem is that Twitter does a thousand other things. It’s impossible to see only tweets about your friends’ current whereabouts. Hence, the need for services like Foursquare and Gowalla, which include very specific feature sets that make checkins, i.e. tweets about where you are, more useful and meaningful. These services go deep into this vertical tweet niche. So it ought to be acknowledged that the rapid success of Foursquare and Gowalla has a lot to do with the behavior Twitter established. Dodgeball? Sorry, the widespread consumer behavior wasn’t established there.

 

Plancast

Plancast lets you broadcast your future whereabouts i.e. where you’ll be at a particular date and time. It could be within the next couple hours or several months from now. Your friends see this, and they can essentially RSVP to be there with you. It’s a handy social utility. But a “plan” is really just a tweet about where you’re going to be. Plancast has institutionalized this specific category of tweet by creating a feature set designed for this purpose. Again, we were already engaging in this type of activity. Like the characters in a Happy Days spin-off, we were already familiar with it. It just needed to be productized and packaged accordingly to make it more useful and effective.

GetGlue

GetGlue takes the “checkin” in a whole new direction. Instead of physical places, it enables users to check-in to movies, TV shows, books, video games, etc. Pretty much any type of media. The idea is that you can see others, including friends, who are watching the same show and join a conversation about it in real time. In fact, this is one of the first ways we used Twitter. We’re big fans of The Daily Show and Colbert Report. As we watched these shows in 2008, we’d tweet out various quotes and zingers. Others would respond, and we’d have a conversation. This type of Twitter activity became most pronounced during the 2008 presidential debates, where we’d follow specific hashtags and both CNN and Current TV would display tweets on screen. Now that Twitter has exploded in size, it makes a lot more sense to engage in this type of activity with a dedicated service like GetGlue. Once again, though, Twitter established the behavior and paved the way for GetGlue’s success.

Foodspotting

Foodspotting has productized the most vocal critique of Twitter. Who cares what you’re having for breakfast, lunch, or dinner? Well, if you focus in on these types of tweets and add both photos and places, then you have the makings of a valuable service. With the exception of Denny’s and most Thai restaurants, menus don’t typically have pictures, much less consumer reviews. Foodspotting could provide a crowdsourced, virtual menu for any and every restaurant in the world. Just open the app, select the restaurant, and browse images. Its success, of course, will be traced back to those annoying what-I’m-eating tweets.

Conclusion

As with Happy Days, Twitter was the first to introduce the above characters, which have each gone on to become their own show. We became familiar with them and established certain affinities. In studio terms, they tested well. So it should come as no surprise that, like Laverne & Shirley or Mork and Mindy, they’re realizing some success.

It should be noted that these Twitter spin-offs have also built audiences by enabling users to push their activity to Twitter (and Facebook). If you’re building a service based on a vertical tweet niche, it’s only natural that it serves as a Twitter proxy. The problem is that this does nothing for Twitter’s noise and relevance issues. The great potential of isolating these activities on dedicated services is that they no longer have to clutter our Twitter streams. If we want to know where our friends are, where they’re going to be, what they’re watching, and what they’re eating, we can now use Foursquare/Gowalla, Plancast, GetGlue, and Foodspotting respectively. Otherwise, we’ll continue to use Twitter for…well, all of the other things we use Twitter for. That is, until some other tweet niche gets spun off into its own dedicated service.

What other services have been spun-off from Twitter in this way? What others might be spun off in the future? Feel free to speculate in the comments.