Twitter

Twitter - Brief History

Noah had a product where you call a phone number and it would turn your message into an MP3 hosted on the Internet. That was the technology that Noah brought that turned into Odeo," says early employee Ray McClure.

Along with Charles River Ventures and about a dozen other individuals, one of Glass's earliest investors in Odeo was a former Google employee named Evan Williams. Williams was more involved with Odeo than most investors are with startups in their portfolios, and eventually, Odeo moved from Noah's apartment to Williams's. Williams, who had recently sold a company called Blogger to Google, had just bought a nice house and wanted to put his old apartment to good use.

"I think it was something Ev was interested in, but it was mostly Noah's thing," says McClure.
"At that time, it would have been me, Evan [Henshwaw-Plath, better know by friends as "Rabble,"] and Rabble's wife Gabba. Mostly it was the four of us working out of the apartment."
Next, Odeo moved into an office and started hiring more employees – including a quiet, on-again, off-again Web designer named Jack Dorsey and an engineer named Blaine Cook. Evan Williams became Odeo's CEO.
By July 2005, Odeo had a product: a platform for podcasting.

But then, in the fall of 2005, "the shit hit the fan," says George Zachary, the Charles River Ventures partner who led the firm's investment in Odeo.

That was when Apple first announced iTunes would include a podcasting platform built into every one of the 200 million iPods Apple would eventually sell. Around the same time, Odeo employees, from Glass and Williams on down, began to realize that they weren't listening to podcasts as much as they thought they would be.

Says Cook: "We built [Odeo], we tested it a lot, but we never used it."
Suddenly, says Zachary, "the company was going sideways."
By this point, Odeo had 14 people working full time – including now-CEO Evan Williams and a friend of his from Google, Christopher "Biz" Stone.

Williams decided Odeo's future was not in podcasting, and later that year, he told the company's employees to start coming up with ideas for a new direction Odeo could go. The company started holding official "hackathons" where employees would spend a whole day working on projects. They broke off into groups.
Odeo cofounder Noah Glass gravitated toward Jack Dorsey, whom Glass says was "one of the stars of the company." Jack had an idea for a completely different product that revolved around "status"--what people were doing at a given time.

"I got the impression he was unhappy with what he was working on – a lot of cleanup work on Odeo."
"He started talking to me about this idea of status and how he was really interested in status," Glass says. "I was trying to figure out what it was he found compelling about it."

"There was a moment when I was sitting with Jack and I said, 'Oh, I do see how this could really come together to make something really compelling.' We were sitting on Mission St. in the car in the rain. We were going out and I was dropping him off and having this conversation. It all fit together for me."
One day in February 2006, Glass, Dorsey, and a German contract developer Florian Weber presented Jack's idea to the rest of the company. It was a system where you could send a text to one number and it would be broadcasted out to all of your friends: Twttr.

Noah Glass says it was he who came up with the name "Twttr." "I spent a bunch of time thinking about it," he says. Eventually, the name would become Twitter.
After that February presentation to the company, Evan Williams was skeptical of Twitter's potential, but he put Glass in charge of the project. From time to time, Biz Stone helped out Glass's Twitter team.
And it really was Glass's team, by the way. Not Jack Dorsey's.
Everyone agrees that original inkling for Twitter sprang from Jack Dorsey's mind. Dorsey even has drawings of something that looks like Twitter that he made years before he joined Odeo. And Jack was obviously central to the Twitter team.

But all of the early employees and Odeo investors we talked to also agree that no one at Odeo was more passionate about Twitter in the early days than Odeo's cofounder, Noah Glass.
"It was predominantly Noah who pushed for the project to be started," says Blaine Cook, who describes Glass as Twitter's "spiritual leader."
"He definitely had a vision for what it was," says Ray McClure.
"There were two people who were really excited [about Twitter,]" concurs Odeo investor George Zachary. "Jack and Noah Glass. Noah was fanatically excited about Twitter. Fanatically! Evan and Biz weren't at that level. Not remotely."

Zachary says Glass told him, "You know what's awesome about this thing? It makes you feel like you're right with that person. It's a whole emotional impact. You feel like you're connected with that person."
At one point the entire early Twitter service was running on Glass's laptop. "An IBM Thinkpad," Glass says, "Using a Verizon wireless card."
"It was right there on my desk. I could just pick it up and take it anywhere in the world. That was a really fun time."

Glass insists that he is not Twitter's sole founder or anything like it. But he feels betrayed that his role has basically been expunged from Twitter history. He says Florian Weber doesn't get enough credit, either.
"Some people have gotten credit, some people haven't. The reality is it was a group effort. I didn't create Twitter on my own. It came out of conversations."

"I do know that without me, Twitter wouldn't exist. In a huge way."
By March of 2006, Odeo had a working Twitter prototype. In July, TechCrunch covered Twttr for the first time. That same summer, Odeo employees obsessed with Twitter were racking up monthly SMS bills totalling hundreds of dollars. The company agreed to pay those bills for the employees. In August, a small earthquake shook San Francisco and word quickly spread through Twitter – an early 'ah-ha!' moment for users and company-watchers alike. By that fall, Twitter had thousands of users.
By this point, engineer Blaine Cook says it began to feel like there were "two companies" at Odeo – the one "Noah and Florian and Jack and Biz were working on" (Twitter) and Odeo. Twitter, says Ray McClure, "was definitely the thing you wanted to be working on."



Twitter has gripped the attention of millions around the planet with its 140 character SMS style microblogging service. It reached 100 million active users recently and has also crossed 5bn tweets. A large number of heads of state and celebrities use Twitter daily to talk to their fans and followers. Ok so that’s enough of facts, isn’t it?

But then can Twitter cultivate real friendships? Do people search for real friendships here? What would define a real friendship? Can real friendships exist on social networks where people may actually fake their identities? I am sure many of these questions would be swirling in the readers mind. Let’s take it one by one.


Twitter is different from other social networks in one simple thing. One can follow anyone and everyone from a normal person to a celebrity. This means that I could tweet to a guy sitting in Alaska and become his / her regular online friend something which Facebook, Orkut etc. never allowed one to do. But then there are multiple things one needs to consider here.

1. Information short lived?: -Twitter is essentially a tool where information is pretty short lived. What this means is that since people keep talking about general topics all the time, a particular kind of information may not be in discussions for a long time. Say India has lost a cricket match today to England. People will discuss about it only for a few hours and if something else happens tomorrow like Anna’s protest in Ramila, tweets would begin to flow on that and the match would be forgotten. Though there are hash tags (#) to encourage information retention, it still gets really difficult to retain the interest of the people on a topic for long.

2. Timepass?:- Twitter is more of a pastime for a lot of users. Whether its having mindless conversations or starting crazy hash tags, Twitter is a place for relaxation for a lot many.

3. Celebrities abound?:- A lot many people on Twitter are presently there just because there are many celebrities around or because its a trend. Say a person like Poonam Pandey started using Twitter to post her motivational pics and got news coverage. Seeing this a person got interested and finally joined Twitter just to follow her and enjoy the coverage.

Obviously everyone doesn’t come in the category of the above three. There are many who use it for passing on information, having opinions on different events or simply trying to befriend others.

But since the above three hold true to a large extent, Twitter by itself would fail miserably in cultivating real friendships. Obviously I am sure that wasn’t one of Jack Dorsey’s or Biz Stone’s aims when they began it.

But where it stands today, Twitter would no doubt be able to cultivate friendships in partnership with Facebook, Gtalk and the mobile phone.