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?
Biz Stone: We were really excited about it; and to us, that’s really important. If we’re excited about something, then we think it’s worth pursuing, even if there isn’t a whole bunch of people signing on right away. If it’s enough to keep us excited, then it’s enough to keep working on it. We were also fairly early on pretty convinced that since we liked it so much at least some other people would. That’s why we, in fact, decided to go from the initial two-week project into turning it more of a longer-term experiment. Initially, just by releasing it to friends and family, we saw a little bit of growth. It was fairly, fairly modest; and then sometime just before, or around, or after this technology that we went through called South by Southwest, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, we went to this conference and we won. We actually won the South by Southwest Web Award, so there’s some trash around that. At the same time, the South by Southwest Conference, which is technology, music and sound, and by the time the conference in March was happening, we had enough of sort of a good amount of technology-type folks already on Twitter because it was interesting to them early on. What happened was it was sort of just a perfect conflux; it was an event at which you really do want to know in a hyperconnected way where your friends are and what they’re doing. At the same time, I had just enough of people already on it so that it could start spreading. So, everything kind of came together. Since March, since even a little bit before March, we’ve been seeing double, like about every three weeks the actual user base doubles because it really is growing like crazy.
I would definitely say we thought there was something there, but every thing about Twitter moves at a much faster pace. I came originally from a site called Xanga.com, which now is a popular Web blogging and social network community, and then I was at Google for two years working on Blogger. My experience with both those, working on both those applications and then working on Twitter is that Twitter is just so much faster than them. Just to give an example of the way we measure an active user at Twitter is how many times they posted in a day and the way we measured an active user at Blogger was if they posted at all in a month. Just the activity, alone, is kind of what is the most outrageous, but also the most exciting.
Dan Skeen: That’s fascinating. You mentioned that the conference that already a handful of tech enthusiasts using your service. How did you get started with that, how did spread the word to the right set of influential people to begin with? Was it just Twitter friends and family and it extended from there?
Biz Stone: Basically, it was Twitter friends and family; and we never had any kind of specific plan to launch the product. I think eight months ago, late August, if that’s eight months ago, I’m not sure, there was a blog posted on Twitter; and that became our sort of public launch, even though we hadn’t planned on it yet. There was a lot of unfinished stuff. For example, you could only sign up by giving us your phone number, which wouldn’t have been the way we would have ideally started because we know that’s kind of scary to a lot of people. Because of a popular blogger that sort of links to us early on, after I checked out this new site by the people who have also worked on sites like Xanga and Blogger and stuff, it was immediately sort of attractive. Also, it’s just such a simple concept that I think it was immediately attractive to the blogger types.
We also had an API very early, so it was a neat year where we were able to fiddle around with that and, so the philosophy on these, it’s the same as philosophy sort of in general, it’s very simple, so even somebody who is not that familiar with working with API’s, a developer who wants to get started working on API’s, Twitter is kind of the easiest one to get started with. There are many things that encouraged the more technologically-inclined types to start playing with Twitter, and I think that’s what led to having just the right amount of geekier types already on the system by the time we went to South by Southwest. So, it wasn’t necessarily planned; but those are our friends and those are the people that we associate with a lot anyway just personally, so it just happens also that a lot of our friends and family are already blogger types anyway. It wasn’t necessarily like a premeditated plan, but it worked.
Dan Skeen: Now you mentioned a popular blogger link to you, who was that?
Biz Stone: That was OM, from GigaOM.
Dan Skeen: I’m thinking of other companies here. Everybody wants to generate buzz for their products and have that kind of viral success that you’ve had, easier said than done of course. You mentioned an API as one way to get folks engaged, do you have any other tips for other companies that are offering a service and wanting to not spend millions in marketing, but maybe grow things organically?
Biz Stone: You’ve got to really love it, and you really have to be into it enough that you’re excited about it. If it’s just a business to you, I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere. We were really, like I said, sort of feeling it out and finding out what to use in it, and we were just brimming with ideas of what we could add to it and how we could make it better and stuff. I think if that’s not happening with you, with your product, then you should change things up because ultimately, when it comes time to try to get the kind of buzz that you want or need, it’s not going to flow naturally. Whenever you write about the product, it’s not going to seem like you total love it; so there’s that, which is totally crucial. There’s just I think making sure that you find ways to create a very open dialog with the people who are using your service, even if it’s 10 people at first to blog about stuff and respond in the comments and keep blogging on the post if something comes up, to send out e-mails if you can to the people who are using the product just giving them updates on what went wrong or what you’re thinking of doing or what are you guys thinking.
Then also use the product yourself a lot; and if somebody new comes on, you make a friend of them, you say who you are, and all the kind of stuff, where you just throw yourself really into it completely and let your personality, I think, be part of the personality of the product. I guess that wouldn’t work if you had a grating personality, but it depends on the product. I think just making use, really, of making it part of your life. Then, know how to open up; like be really comfortable opening up. If you make a big mistake, be comfortable explaining that you understand that you made a mistake, and here’s why I did that, and here’s what you’re doing to fix it. I think more and more companies are learning that. You just sort of catch a lot more flies with honey, rather than fame, you know, we’re fancy, and we don’t make mistakes, that kind of thing because that just turns people off, I think. I mean, I think even just showing a little human nature in there helps, so I don’t know if that definitely answers the question with regard to how you generate buzz.
One of the things is that you engineer it in. I mean you make sure that you build futures for your product that allow them to, if somebody thinks something is funny and wants to send it to someone else or mark it, you know give it a little mark like we have stars on the updates and if you’re looking to just click a little star. Stuff that encourages a feedback loop is often very helpful so that a new user comes along makes a post and thinks no one is going to read that and the next time that they come back, they see that someone has starred it. Well, that’s a little bit of an encouragement to say well, maybe this is something. Maybe I’m good at this. Maybe people like what I’m writing, so maybe I’ll keep going; and then they are motivated to invite their friends and so on.
Dan Skeen: Now I think one thing that’s fascinating for a lot of people is this notion of, in some cases, broadcasting the details of your life. Is there a certain type of person who’s attracted to this ability to share everything they’re doing with a number of people at once?
Biz Stone: I think, specifically with Twitter, the norm is that people have just a handful of friends on the system, like a handful of close buddies. Most users on Twitter actually have between 6-12 friends, and they don’t even subscribe to it or follow them all on their phones. They may only follow three on their phone and then the rest of them on the Web, so the tendency, the norm, is to stay connected with your little tight little niche of buddies. Even the stupidest little silly things are meaningful to each other. If you just text the words, hee, hee, hee, someone is saying well, I wonder what Biz is laughing at; I just like to be laughing. It makes me feel good. There’s definitely a much smaller slice of people who maybe come from the blogging world where they want as many people as possible to know what they’re up to and that’s a different situation.
I think there are some things in the middle where you are communicating with your friends, but you’re leaving your communications open in such a way that there’s a possibility of sort of like a social alchemy to take place, like you don’t know what’s going to happen but maybe you’re going to attract a new friend or a new opportunity of some kind. Like I read that you said that you really like Dr. Pepper; I work for Dr. Pepper, how’d you like a year’s supply? I don’t know. That’s not a good example; but with me for blogging was, I was invited to write books about blogging because I was writing about blogging and that’s something that never would have happened if I weren’t open to the world, you know.
Dan Skeen: Forgive me if this exists, but is there an ability to revise Twitters or you’re messages on there or is this something that’s…
Biz Stone: You mean edit them?
Dan Skeen: Yes, after the fact.
Biz Stone: The only thing you can do is you can go back in and you can delete one. You can’t edit them right now, just because first of all they’re so short. They’re 140 characters, and the idea is that there’s this limitation, this restraint that ultimately breeds more creativity; and there’s this idea that it’s very casual. We’re trying to lower the barrier so that you shouldn’t worry about it if you make a typo or text something weird on your phone; you should just let it go because part of the thing is if you’ve text in it, if you’ve already written it in and sent it out, it’s already been delivered to a bunch of phones and a bunch of instant message clients and a bunch of pages. Since Twitter messages are so short and kind of almost like common sense comments on there, the kind of situation, revising them would go back and sort of change what the original feel was. You can imagine if you went back on a string of comments on a blog post and you changed what you said, and then the rest of it doesn’t make sense. So it would screw up the context of all of your post. As a result both of keeping things simple and making it not weird, we decided you can read them; but you can’t edit them.
Dan Skeen: You’re in a unique position here being able to see all the activity on your service. Are there patterns you notice that may not…one person’s Twittering here about this and that, another person’s over here, have you drawn any interesting threads between all the activity that’s going on at your service and noticed any patterns that would be of interest?
Biz Stone: In coming weeks and months we want to dig much more into this because we realize that there’ tons of interesting sort of patterns like that to be learned; and then we’re going to take that information, and we’re going to try to develop features for our application that give users what they want with regard to those kinds of times. We have seen people just doing interesting things like somebody started posting their Twitter updates in haiku form; and then others took to it, and we thought it was very creative like. Here they are, not only updating what their feeling but they’re doing it in haiku format; that was very interesting. A lot of it just speaks to human nature like when somebody gets an idea, well, wow; I’m going to try to be as creative as you.
Some people have sort of made a competition about how many friends they’ve got on Twitter. I guess that would be natural in any kind of situation like where people go, I’ve got 100 people who like my updates; and you’ve only got 90. I’m better than you. But with regard to patterns, it’s very much, it really is very much being used in the way that we expected it to be used. Maybe there’s a little bit more…One thing that we didn’t maybe expect as completely as it is to be and which we should have seen coming is that people really do respond to someone if a friend of theirs says something like, having a bad day. They want to know why, so we put in direct messaging which allows you to send a note just to that person through the Twitter system by pressing the update with the letter D and then their user name.
What we found was that people are more likely to respond directly to that person in open not in private, and they adopted a way of being there by creating an @ symbol. So, Biz says ‘I’m not feeling very well today’; and then someone will say, @Biz ‘go get some soup’. They’ll do it in such a way that they’re not just responding to me, they’re letting everyone else see that they responded to me in that way. Again, I think that goes back to the whole idea of just like social alchemy-type thing. They’re exposing that, and they want other people to see that they’re responding to me in that way because that in a way is a description of how they are. The fact that they wished me well, reflects on them, as well; and it’s another way of self-expression. That’s been pretty interesting.
Dan Skeen: I noticed on your blog that you have some changes to your service here in Australia, can you comment on what’s been going on there with, was it a cost issue for your service because of the messaging, or was it a cost for end-users?
Biz Stone: Typically, it really just comes down to basically, we had the number that we were using that we were going through people would send us the update for us to send the update out was not a local number; and they should have, but it’s not a local number. What that means is that users were paying more than they needed to pay, and we were paying more than we needed to pay. We temporarily suspended the service while we moved to a new number to route the messages to, so we’re actually finishing that up now; it will be activated very soon, I’m hoping this week so that we can restore the SMS feature. All the other features, meanwhile, were working fine, the instant message, the Web; it was just the SMS deliveries that were suspended while we moved to that new number. We felt partially responsible for us to keep it going when it cost more than it really needed to cost.
Dan Skeen: I think you’ve been very gracious here in answering all my questions; so if I could ask just one more, tell me what’s next for Twitter and the team? What do you have planned on the horizon?
Biz Stone: We just became Twitter Incorporated last week. I don’t know if you knew that or not, but with that, what we’re really doing now is we are just very much focusing on the growth and making sure that we can accommodate the growth and also focusing on user experience on the site. We can show that people are liking the site, using it, that the messages are getting routed, that we’re building the world’s best diagnostic message running system, all that sort of thing. That’s what’s next; and then with regard to features, what were doing is we’re very much following user behavior and we’re paying attention to what people are twittering about; and we’re trying to prioritize. People seem to want these features, and let’s research them and find out what they mean when they say they want them, like a lot of people ask for groups. We have to find out, do they just want a way to group their friends, or are they talking about a different way of using Twitter. It’s very much about following user behavior here and dealing with the growth right now.
Dan Skeen: Very good, thanks very much, Biz. I appreciate it
Biz Stone: No problem.