Archive for May, 2007
May 23rd, 2007 - The Origin of Twitter
This is my first podcast, so don’t expect much. Sad part is I have friends in A/V production who will no doubt have a good laugh at my first attempt. Ah well, here goes nothing…
During my interview with Biz Stone of Twitter, he described how the team first came up with the idea for what has become a wildly successful messaging tool. It’s a good story and I didn’t get a chance to share it in my column on Twitter, so here is the audio. Or you can read the full transcript.
May 23rd, 2007 - Interview with Biz Stone, Co-Founder of Twitter
Here is a transcript of my interview with Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. You can read the resulting article in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Dan Skeen: I’m going to ask you a question probably a million people have already; so bear with me, but tell me about the origins of Twitter, where the idea came from and how it all got started?
Biz Stone: Actually, the basic idea for Twitter came from my colleague and co-founder Jack Dorsey. A little history about Jack is he had been, it turned out, obsessed with the idea of dispatch, like with regard to a taxicab and so forth since the age of about 14. He had always wanted to write software that would help dispatch taxies, but he was living in St. Louis at the time. He wrote software for couriers, like bike couriers, and they didn’t really need that anywhere in St. Louis. To make a long story short, he ended up moving to New York City and starting a company and writing software for a taxi cab dispatch, which is basically at its core sort of messaging service. At some point, he started mulling around with the idea of, wouldn’t it be neat if people could fake and not bid, sort of the same, in a similar fashion, but very simply.
One of the things that struck him was the way people were using that little status field in, when you use like AIM or other instant message clients, you know how there’s that status field that says, at a meeting, going to lunch, whatever. It turns out that, for about five years prior to working with us, he thought to himself that it would really be cool to make a whole service out of just that little status field; but he wasn’t exactly sure how that would manifest. He was working on another project, so he didn’t have time to do it; but when he started working at Odeo with myself and Evan Williams and a bunch of other folks here, at one point he decided he would just mention the idea. He said I’ve got this great idea, I really want to create a tool that focuses on something really simple like statuses as a way to keep friends and relatives sort of connecting at a very simple sort of ambient way.
At the same time, we had been discussing various interesting use cases for SMS; so when he brought the idea to us, we merged it with the idea of, well, what if you could set this so called status with an SMS, making it totally mobile and creating the ability for you and your friends to constantly be in touch by following each other’s status updates and using SMS. That’s when we decided; well, that’s a cool idea. So, we took two weeks; we were working Odeo, which was the podcasting company at the time; but Evan decided that Jack and I should sort of go off in a corner and spend two weeks living a prototype, which we did. We presented it to the rest of the team, and everyone just totally loved it; it was something that just caught on very quickly. It was sort of a giggle-inducing to be able to be sitting, you know, working at home, ripping up carpet, having your phone vibrate, and there’s your friend is sipping wine in Napa and another friend is heading to the beach, and you’re just laughing at sort of the context of it all, and just knowing that they’re doing that; and so we did update.
We decided then that we should work on it a little bit longer, but basically, that was the origin of it. Then later, we decided to begin adding multiple devices to it. So, rather than just SMS, you’d be able to update over an instant message or the Web, or increasingly other waves so that what we really got technology-wise is just a devising method for message-writing systems. The most popular use case right now for it is social; people are very much using it to stay connected with themselves or friends.
Dan Skeen: Now, it sounds like you guys are pretty stoked about the product right off the bat, but I would guess that it’s wildly exceeded your expectations in terms of adoption and popularity. Can you talk to me a bit about what you expected from the product and compare that to the actual state?
May 11th, 2007 - New Interviews and Articles
I’ve got some great material that I’ll be posting here quite soon. Here are some of the interviews I’ve done recently:
- Biz Stone, one of the founders of Twitter
- Dan Warner, Chief Strategy Officer at Dark Blue Sea, owner of the world’s second largest domain name portfolio
- An expert at flipping web sites, that is buying cheap web properties and turning them around at a huge profit
- Darren Rowse at Problogger
- Warren Adelman, COO of GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain registrar
There’s lots of audio too so I’ll post my first podcasts here as well. Subscribe via RSS or email and you won’t miss a thing.