February 17, 2014 • 39 mins
How did Twitter get started? We explore the controversial history of Twitter and how it emerged from a company called Odeo.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in test with technology with Text Stuff from stuff
dot com. Hey everyone, and welcome to text Stuff. I'm
Jonathan Strickland, and and we're going to try and bring
you this podcast in characters are fewer. I don't think
that's an accurate description. But we are talking about Twitter today, Yes,
(00:27):
we are. In fact, anyone who knows me knows that
that would be impossible for me to express any thought
in characters or fewer. Well, you you do it pretty frequently.
I mean you're on Twitter. You have multiple Twitter accounts. Yes,
that's why I have to link like eight tweets in
a row for one thought. That's true. You do that thing, yeah,
do um. But anyway, yes, we're gonna talk about Twitter.
And for those of you who have been listening to
(00:49):
Text Stuff for years and years and years, you might say,
well hang on there. I seem to recall back in
the dark days, way back before you guys had any
idea of how you were doing podcasting, that you tried
to tackle Twitter before, and to you, I say, hey,
words can hurt. Twitter was the topic of the twelfth
ever episode of tech Stuff, way back on August four,
(01:11):
two thousan episode, and now we're up to almost six hundred. Ye.
But yeah, we talked in that episode about the technology
of Twitter, what what it actually was, and back then
it was in its still pretty young days, and we
thought now it would be fun to talk about the
actual story of the company itself. Right because in the
(01:32):
intervening time period, as of February, which is when we
are recording this podcast, Twitter has two hundred and forty
one million monthly active users who send some five hundred
million tweets per day. Yeah. That's uh, that's pretty heavy volume.
And if you had asked me back then when we
first did the Twitter podcast, if I thought that it
was ever going to get that big, I probably would
(01:55):
have laughed in your face because at that point I
had only been using Twitter for a little while. But
we'll get in to when we both started using Twitter
as we go through this podcast, and that that big.
And I do want to say also, that widespread because
only thirty three of Twitter's accounts are from the US. Yeah,
and that's a big deal. In fact, it's played a
huge role in some world shaping events actually, and we'll
(02:16):
talk about that too. Um, and might as well say,
this is gonna be two episodes because it's a long story,
so we doesn't want to do a like an epic
one and a half hour episode of tech stuff, so
we're going to split them up. But the other interesting
thing about Twitter and it's early days is that it's
actually kind of controversial. It's not just a simple story.
(02:37):
If you go and look at most of the uh
the accounts of the early days of Twitter, you hear
about three co founders, and that would be Jack Dorsey
or at Jack on Twitter, Evan Williams at e V
or at ev on Twitter, and Christopher biz Stone or
at biz on Twitter. So, uh that that's like the
(02:58):
official story is, those are the three people who co
founded Twitter. But if you look into it a little
more deeply, you'll see some other names pop up, other
people who were instrumental in the early days, including someone
named Noah Glass, who, according to at least some people,
should at least be considered another co founder. Um, and
we'll explain, you know, the whole controversy behind that story too.
(03:21):
It's pretty interesting stuff. Uh. This was all stuff that
I was completely unaware of back when I did the
first episode of Twitter, because none of a lot of
people were talking about the actual early days. In fact,
a lot of people were skeptical that this thing was
going to stick around for very long. Sure it wasn't
so big yet that people had started to really do
these sort of interesting inner looks and mini biographies and
(03:42):
stuff like yeah, yeah, Well, it hadn't been around long
enough for it to really accrue much of a story
at that point, unless you had been at south By
Southwest and then thought that it was the most amazing
thing in the world. So the story of Twitter actually
begins with a different company called Odio, and Odio was
a company that was looking into creating a platform for podcasting,
(04:03):
and it was kind of similar in a way to Twitter,
because in the early days of Twitter, it was very
much focused on using your phone to send out messages.
Uh Odeo was looking at creating a product that was
more about allowing you to create a voicemail message that
would then be converted into an MP three file and
hosted on the web, so you could create a podcast
(04:25):
that way if you wanted to. You could actually dial
into this and create a long message that then would
be converted into an MP three and hosted. And they thought, well,
this is a great way of getting giving people the
power of broadcasting. They can actually sit down and do
exactly what Lauren and I are doing right now. We're
talking into a microphone and we're having it recorded. Then
we can broadcast it out and uh. There were some
(04:48):
problems in those early days with this product. One was
that it launched in two thousand five, just a little
bit before another big podcasting product launched, just iTunes. Yeah,
iTunes the the platform that defined podcasting in those early days.
Now these days, you can obviously get podcasts through lots
(05:08):
of different programs, lots of different podcast catchers, but iTunes
for a very long time was pretty much the only
game in town because so many people subscribe to it
that everything else was like a teeny tiny slice of
the pie. And beyond that, the other story was that
all these people at Odeo were saying, you know, we
(05:29):
work really hard on this product all the time, but
none of us are using it. Bad sign So if
you are not, If you are an engineer and you're
working on a product you know and you're not using it,
that's what Google calls dog fooding, where the people over
at Google use the products that they're working on. Um,
if if no one's doing that, that's a bad sign
(05:50):
and suggest that perhaps you won't be able to find
customers either. So while all this is going on, I mean,
it was clearly a stressful time at Odeo. There were
some other people who had ideas for potential other uses
of SMS technology, that short messaging service technology, including a
(06:11):
Mr Jack Dorsey. As I recall, yeah, all of all
of the people that we mentioned at the top of
the show as being these these founders or controversial founders
of Twitter were involved with Odeo at the time. Yes, yeah,
In fact, some of them actually had come over from Google. Uh.
Evan Williams was the founder of a little program called
or a little service called Blogger, which got acquired by
(06:31):
Google made him a multi millionaire. He then left Google
to be one of the co founders of Odeo and
the CEO I believe, Yeah, and Biz also was with
Google before Odeo. And Jack Dorsey was a web developer,
and so Mr Noah Glass was the one who had
come up with this technology that that created that platform, Yeah, exactly.
(06:53):
And so Dorsey had this other idea, and he had
been kicking it around for a while. Actually, he had
this idea of allowing people to share just a really
brief status update, just kind of like what's going on
with their life. At that very moment, Twitter was almost
called status that's s T A T dot us in fact,
and Dorsey has talked about how fond he is of
(07:15):
those kind of little kitchy web naming Yeah, where you
can where you can make the the top level domain
be the completion of whatever your product um But he
he says that he had first come up with the
idea way back in July of two thousand, just a
couple of months into his use of live journal, which
was a pretty new thing at the time. His concept
(07:37):
was to make a and I quote a more live
live journal, real time up to date from the road,
akin to updating your A I M. Status from wherever
you are and sharing it. So he was looking into like,
this is a great idea. I know, this is a
great idea. This is going to resonate with people. People
are going to be addicted to this. I just don't
know where to put it. I have no idea where. Yeah,
(07:58):
he toyed with implementing it in a whole bunch of
different bits of software that he was working on, and
his cohorts at Odeo were working on and it just
kind of didn't take off for six years. Yeah, he
eventually was able to talk to Noah Glass and explain
the idea in a way that Glass was able to
to latch onto it. In fact, if you read interviews
(08:18):
with Glass and with Dorsey, uh, they talk about how
it was this kind of crazy take the guy out
to lunch and explain it. And then yeah, but why
would anyone want to do that? No, no, no, no no, seriously,
people are gonna want to do them. Yeah, but but
why are people going to want to do that? And
eventually Glass saw the light, you know, something switched on
in his mind. He said, yeah, this is we could
(08:39):
totally implement this. We could create a system where you
could broadcast out a message to a network of people
who follow you. Why don't we do that? And so um,
Glass ended up kind of becoming the chief evangelist of
this idea, this product idea, which still was not an
official thing with Odeo. So they decide Dorsey and Glass
along with a third fellow named Florian Webber, to present
(09:02):
this idea to the business owners at Odeo. So Evan
Williams and Biz Stone and kind of say, look, this
is an idea we have for a different kind of product.
We think that there's a lot of potential here. Our
podcast platform doesn't seem to really be going anywhere. Why
don't we do this because otherwise was our company gonna do? Right?
And that was in February of two thousand six, and
(09:25):
the product that they were that they were recommending was
specifically called Twitter and that is spelled t W T
t R. Yeah. Yeah, because every single character space is valuable,
So get rid of those vowels. You know. Actually, I've
actually seen some tweets that are written in the style
as if they were all following that philosophy, just dropping
(09:46):
all the vowels. It's it's frightening how well you can
start to read those once you practice a little bit. Yeah,
the human brain is terrific, Like, so don't understand that
text speak that the kids are all crazy about. Yeah, lulls.
So anyway, Yeah, February two thousand six, this idea gets
a little bit of traction. And while the response was
not immediately this is what we're going to do from
(10:09):
here on out, essentially, Glass and Dorsey and Webber got
the go ahead to start working on this product, and
so they did and they began to launch it very
gradually once they started building the actual UH technology out.
In fact, Glass says that for a while he was
running the entire service of Twitter off of his laptop,
(10:31):
like it wasn't a server. It lived on his laptop,
and his laptop had to be on and plugged in
and everything and everything was funneled through there. And if
you're not really familiar with especially the early days of Twitter,
keep in mind we're talking two thousand six, that's before
the iPhone comes out, so this is before smartphones. We're
not talking about an app that allows you to UH
(10:52):
to look at Twitter and follow back on that SMS exactly,
just text messages, the same source stuff you would use
if you were to text a friend. So you could
either dial in a a special number and send a
text to that number and then it would just broadcast
out to all of the people who follow you on Twitter,
or you could post on the web client. You could
(11:14):
go to a web page, which you know people still
do occasionally, they'll still go to the Twitter web page
and type stuff in online on their desktop, But there
wasn't any kind of smartphone app interface at this point,
so it was really early days. So Glass was put
in charge of this project and they kind of worked
(11:34):
on this for a while until about March twenty one,
two thousand and six, when the service was actually ready
to support a tweet, and that's when the very first
tweet was written. It was sent by by Jack at
Jack Dorsey and uh, and here it is, guys. I mean,
if you this rivals the first video on YouTube for
(11:55):
like colossal importance, Jack's first Twitter was just setting up
my Twitter. That's Twitter, t W T t R. You know,
like we said earlier, there's a period in there too.
Oh yes, yeah he did. He did use the character
of a period as well. So um yeah, so if
you when I made that YouTube joke, that's for anyone
who remembers that the very first video ever uploaded the
(12:18):
YouTube was a Day at the Zoo. Was one of
the YouTube founders taking a video at a local zoo
and then uploading it. So yeah, sometimes these these things
that end up having world changing uh reach, start off
kind of modest of the bang. But that's but that's
okay too. And uh, in case you're wondering, like what
(12:40):
else is going on around this same time that Twitter
first starts to to to be active. Facebook at that
time had just earlier that year set up their public
uh entry into Facebook. In other words, you didn't have
to be a college student to get into Facebook. At
that time. They first started opening it up to a
few of a companies that so, if you're if your
(13:02):
email address had a certain type of private company addressing it,
you could join. And then eventually they opened it up
to the general public. Yeah. Well, well in April of
two thousand six, right, they started opening up that registration
just a month or so after, You're right after, not before.
Thank you, Lauren for keeping us honest. But yes, so
(13:22):
this is early days in the social networking world. Now. Granted,
even in those early days, Facebook still had a pretty
decent headstart, because yeah, it's not like they were new
at that point at all. Yeah, they had had a
lot of colleges involved in that program, and at that
point they had something like six million users. Twitter, after
a few months of it being live, had fewer than
(13:42):
five thousand users. So big big gap there, you can,
you could say, although people were interested in it. In
July two six, there was a really interesting coverage of
Twitter from tech Crunch something. Yeah, Michael Arrington wrote about it,
and uh, in the the article they talked about it
being a group send SMS service. So again this idea
(14:05):
of being able to broadcast out the message to your friends. Now,
this is kind of interesting because if you think of
what Twitter has become, it's a little bit different from
what was how it was first envisioned. Like back in
the day, it might have been something like, you want
to hold a party on the weekend, and you're like,
who wants to go to the pizza party thing? I
want to throw and you just send it out to everybody.
(14:26):
In that way, you don't have to individually send out
text messages to everyone. And that's really how everyone was
billing Twitter as being. You know, this is this is
the way that Twitter should be used. It totally makes sense,
but it's interesting because the way people actually use Twitter
would end up being very different from that. Uh and
in various ways. I mean, a lot of people like
(14:47):
to tell you what they're eating still to this day.
That was a big joke on Twitter for a long time,
but it's I did it recently, took a picture of
a delicious omelet idia and I had to send it out.
But um, yeah, so and then of course we're using
it now for news, and we're using it to uh
to follow celebrities or even interact with people that we
(15:09):
admire when you never would have had that that conduit
open before, or if you're just up to the minute
um networking with with all kinds of people who you
might have never had a chance to talk to. Oh yeah,
I've I've actually been contacted via Twitter to do cool
stuff like to to do a guest appearance on a show,
or to have people give me interesting ideas for shows
(15:31):
that we do. So it's definitely evolved. But what's interesting
is that none of that was really at that point.
Even Mike Arrington, who is, depending upon your point of view,
really good at predicting what's going to work in technology. Uh,
he didn't really touch on that in his article at all.
He actually did compare Twitter to another service that was
(15:53):
called Dodgeball. Now that I think is a little weird
because Dodgeball was more of a location based service and
less of a broadcast a message out service, and Dodgeball
would eventually be acquired by Google. Right. Um it was
it was similar in the way that people were using
it for, uh, for a quick, unobtrusive way to get
(16:13):
in touch with people about something small. Yeah, it's it's
related in the same way that you could say like
MySpace and Facebook were related and that they did similar things,
but they had very different approaches. In fact, maybe even
more different than my Space and Facebook were. But those founders,
after Google bought them out, would go on to create
four Square. All of them left Google. They I hear
(16:36):
a very similar story from the folks who used to
be a blogger and the folks who used to be
with Dodgeball in that once Google acquired the company, satisfaction
kind of dropped out. They just it wasn't a good culture,
it wasn't a mixed Yeah. So they ended up leaving
and founding four Square, which by the way worked out
for them. Um. And then there was another similar service
(16:58):
And anyone who was around in the early days of
Twitter probably has heard of this called Jaiku. It's supposed
to be the combination of the words Japanese and haiku.
It was founded by a couple of Finnish developers, as
in from Finland. Not that they were done, they weren't
finished developers, they were Finnished. I'm just trying to explain.
(17:20):
Lauren just In case people misunderstand me. Um, but yeah,
it used a very similar approach. I mean it was
essentially a a almost identical service, and I actually used
both for a while. Jaiku also would eventually get shuttered.
It would not it would not stand the test of time.
It was just that too many people were using Twitter
and not enough people were using Jaiku, and while the
(17:43):
services were very similar, there wasn't any real reason to
use both, Like, especially at the limited range that Twitter
was operating at the time, it was really only being
populated by um kind of kind of high level, well
connected Silicon Valley sort of types. Yeah, if if you
were around in the very early days of Google Plus,
(18:03):
very similar Like I remember I got invited into the
Google Plus beta like within the first week or two
that it went live, and for a while it felt
like it was just technology owners and technology journalists and
it was awesome. Uh it's still I still very much
enjoy Google Plus, but you know, there's something a little
(18:26):
enticing about being part of this exclusive club. I think
ultimately it's better that it's not exclusive, but you know,
at the same time, it's kind of cool to be
one of the cool kids for like a week, so yeah,
so it's a relatively small scope at the time, and
in fact, the scope was so small that one of
the founders would do something shocking. But we'll get to
(18:46):
that after we take a quick break and thank our sponsors. So, Lauren,
you alluded to something kind of radical that one of
the founders of odio would do, and it upen in
September two thousand and six. It was something that again
another controversial decision in hindsight, At the time, it didn't
(19:08):
seem that controversial, but now it surely does. Which is
that Evan Williams sent out a message to Odio investors
and said that he wanted to buy back the company's
stock from the investors because he didn't see the company
having any real direction. At that point, the podcast platform
had fallen flat and Twitter was still a very young
(19:29):
service a right, only a fewer than five thousand people
had registered for the service and the two months that
it had been available so far. Right. So eventually Williams
convinced the investors to accept the buy back. And so, uh,
there's not really a publicly available figure for how much
this buyback cost Williams out of his own money, but
(19:51):
the estimations are somewhere around the five million dollar mark,
because that's about how much funding Odeo had received earlier,
So five million dollars. But now the question, and it
wasn't the question then, but the question now is did
Williams have any idea how big Twitter was going to become?
And did he make that buying back in anticipation for
this crazy popular service? Was it earnest or was he
(20:15):
plotting ahead? And here's the thing. People describe Williams as
being incredibly uh, methodical, thoughtful, very quiet, very Some would
even use the term mackea Bellian. Uh, but that's quite
a term. It is quite a term. Yeah, that's that's
that's saying something very specific right there. But I think
(20:36):
I think everyone agrees that what Williams said was perfectly honest.
That the service did have fewer than five thousand users.
So there was no way of knowing at that moment
if those five thousand would ever be larger, Like there's
no way of knowing if if they would you know,
top out at twenty. But they did know that people
were using it a lot, and they were using it,
(20:59):
you know, obset Slee is probably being too strong, let's
say frequently but that that people were and and people
inside the company were using it so unlike that that
podcast platform that no one was using. People in the
company were using it so much that Odio had changed
its UH employee agreement to actually pick up their text
messaging fees because people were racking up four D text
(21:22):
message at the time. That was that was a big deal.
That was huge. I mean, no one had unlimited text
plans because who was going to send that many texts?
And they weren't saying necessarily anything, you know, profound. This was, hey,
I had an awesome waffle today, like that kind of stuff.
So there was there's at least some indication that the
service was compelling. Whether or not he knew that the
(21:43):
service was ever going to take off is still up
to a question. Most people, they fall into three camps.
They're either in the camp of, oh, he totally knew
that this was going to be a big thing and
he worked us out of it. Then there's the camp
of I don't think he pushed us out, but I
think I wish I had pushed back more. I wish
I had realized how big this thing was going to be,
(22:06):
because I I really would have liked a piece of that,
and then there's a third camp. It's like, No, he
was probably being very much upfront and honest, and he
hoped that it would become a big thing, but there
was no way, no guarantee at the time. Although I
don't know it's now that I think about it. Williams
proceeded to change Odia's name to Obvious Corp, which kind
(22:26):
of obviously this is gonna be huge. I guess there's
a lot of interpretations we can have in hindsight, but yes,
that is true. He did change the name Odio to
Obvious Corps. And he also did something else that that
again can be a little controversial. He fired Noah Glass. Now,
without Glass, I think most people would agree Twitter never
would have happened because Glass was constantly pushing for Twitter
(22:49):
to be a real product from Odio and he uh,
he was championing it. He was working on the product
all the time. He was trying to sell it to
the rest of Odio, and no one ever made the
reasons for the firing public. Yeah, I mean it's it's
we've we've both heard that Williams and Glass didn't apparently
get along very well. It was a personality class very
(23:10):
big personality clash in the sense that Williams was this
very kind of quiet, methodical person and Glass is known
as being loud and passionate. Some people called him volatile,
that he could lose his temper when things were not
going very well, and that the clash of those personalities
meant that it was just impossible for the two to
co coincide. They just could not coexist, should say, although
(23:34):
glass Is also said about it that he he suspects
he was pushed out by Williams because he Glass originally
wanted to spend Twitter out of odeo CEO of program. Yeah,
he said that I have this idea. I think Twitter
can stand alone as its own thing. I'll be I'll
be glad to be in charge of it. And at
the time he was thinking, oh, this is no problem
because no one else is expressing interest in this product idea,
(23:58):
and I'm really interested in it, so I'll take it over.
Everyone will be happy. But then that's not the way
it unfolded. So Yeah, he's definitely um done some interviews
more recently where he's kind of uh, you know it.
I mean, it's it's clear that he hurt runs deep there.
The pain is deep, because he says that it was
(24:18):
like being betrayed by your friends, and that he even
left San Francisco for a few years, went to Los
Angeles because he couldn't even bear the thought of working
in that industry anymore because it was such a painful experience. Um.
He has since come back to San Francisco and has
worked on other projects, uh, to varying degrees of success,
(24:38):
nothing obviously as successful as Twitter has been. Right um.
Over the next few months, the company would continue to
kind of slowly and quietly grow until until this insane
thing happened at south By Southwest. Yeah, March two thousand seven.
It debuts it south By Southwest and this is uh.
(24:58):
You know. South Southwest is one of those conferences that
if you are able to make a big splash and
get a lot of buzz, you are in a great
position because there's so many high powered executives and employees
from various companies who all are very influential in their
own right. If they start talking about your product, then
(25:19):
you are poised to make a big splash, at least
in the technology sector. It might take a while for
that to spill out to other groups, but in technology,
you are going to you're gonna perform like Gangbusters. Yeah,
and it won their Web Award that year. Yeah, so
I mean they definitely made a strong showing. And you know,
(25:39):
I hear tales about that south By Southwest, about people
you know, immediately getting addicted to this service Twitter and
and all joining their own Like everyone at south By
Southwest created their own little you you know, exclusive club,
a whole bunch of little people just sitting around in
rooms tweeting at each other. So the next thing, you know,
you know, like the CEO of Twitter is getting messages
(26:00):
from the CEO of Facebook, who's also getting messages from
you know, it's and it becomes like this kind of
crazy exclusive club. And it did a lot to raise
the awareness of Twitter. Although even at this point in
two thousand seven, I had heard of it but knew
nothing about it, so I was largely ignorant of what
(26:21):
Twitter was at this point. I think I had one
friend who was on Twitter who was talking about it
being really cool, but I was kind of like, whatever,
I really can't handle having another social media thing right now. Yeah,
I mean I was still busy on my Space. I
didn't join Facebook till two thousand seven, I did so
much live journaling. I actually did do live journaling too,
now that I think about it. But yeah, so April
(26:43):
thousand seven, that's when Twitter uh incorporated, right right right?
They spun off of Obvious Corpse that month into their
own separate company. And yeah, so just like a month,
maybe a month and a half after south By Southwest,
So at this point you could probably hear Noah Glass
crying out and be pretty bad. And then only a
couple of months later they would hold their first round
(27:05):
of um venture capitalist funding. Yep. And the estimate amount
because again this was a private company so they don't
have to release their figures to the public, but the
estimated amount of money they raised was around five point
seven million dollars, so already right on par with what
Odio was raising back in the day. So the company
that you know, Twitter originally was just gonna be a
(27:25):
product of Odio. It wasn't going to be its own thing,
and now it's until it definitely was. Yeah, it's already
rivaling the company that that's that spawned it. Another big
happening in two thousand and seven, in August um the
hashtag debut It was suggested by user Christmas Cina at
Christmasina who suggested it in in a tweet. He just said,
(27:46):
how do you feel about using pound for groups as
in pound bar camp and then message, which made it
way easier to search for specific things on Twitter. Now,
at this point, Twitter didn't even have its own uh
in rated search. You could search tweets through other means,
but using the hashtag made it a lot easier because otherwise,
if you just searched a random term, it would pull
(28:09):
up everything on Twitter that had that word in it.
With the hashtag, it made it much more easy to
uh to find something specific. Yeah, so, yeah, it was.
It was a good idea. In fact, that's another interesting thing.
I didn't really touch on it in my research, but
a lot of the innovations of Twitter come to us
because of the way users use Twitter. It's not something
that was built by the engineers and then filtered out.
(28:31):
It was that people saw ways of increasing Twitter's utility,
and then Twitter said, yeah, we should totally make that
real like official. It's a greater than some of its
parts kind of gig. Yeah. Yeah, some people get a
little more cynical about the approach of that more like
Twitter is very good at stealing the ideas that users have,
(28:51):
but let's be we'll be generous, uh at any rate.
And on in October nine seven, Google acquires Jaiku. So
you aready know the writings on the wall, and Google
buys your company. It seems to be I mean, it's
a joke, but it's also if you look at the
the number of services that Google has introduced and then
look at the number of services that Google has uh
(29:13):
eventually closed the doors on, it's it's a it's not
a great batting average for Google. Right, It's not like
there's a ton of of services that were around back
then that Google introduced that are still around. They tend
to cannibalize a little bit and steal little bits of
companies and keep the people in the services that they
really like and then kind of go ball to the
(29:35):
whole thing. Yeah, you might see some of the technology
incorporated and some of the other stuff, like Google Docs
keeps getting more and more uh advanced and complex, partly
because some of those features were cannibalized from other services.
At any rate. Uh. People debated for a while which
service was going to win out Twitter or Jaiku, but
(29:56):
Twitter already had a headstart with users. It was much
better known in United States, had gone through that explosion
thanks to the south by Southwest, and so it would
be a few years, but eventually Google would announce it
would stop supporting Jaiku, closing it down in January two
thousand twelve. So it did stick around for a really
long time, longer than I thought it did. It wasn't
until I did this research that I realized it was
(30:17):
still around as late as January two twelve. I thought it,
oh yeah, um, But around around this time, in late
two thousand seven, Twitter had all of eight employees still
and they were still very much in development despite all
of this terrific success that they were finding. Throughout the
course of the year, it was offline for a total
of nearly six days for maintenance and overload of servers. Yeah.
(30:39):
In fact, um that also became a running joke, especially
in the early days of Twitter, about how frequently is
Twitter down as opposed to you know what's going on
on Twitter? Like is Twitter still working right now? Would
be a joke, and it would continue to be a
joke for a while. But we'll talk more about that extensively. Actually. Yeah,
So incredibly important day wers history. March two thousand eight,
(31:04):
monumental day for Twitter. That was when I sent my
first tweet from the John Strickland account at John Strickland.
That's me, Uh, and I wrote the article. Here's the
tweet says. You know, I wrote the article on how
Twitter works months ago, and yet I'm just getting into
it now. And uh. Since then, I've written about fifteen
thousand more tweets, mostly about what I was eating. April
(31:27):
two eight, one of the most famous tweets is sent
in that month, and we're talking about actually famous, not
not joke famous. This, this is for real from a person. This,
this tweet affected this person's life phenomenally because if it
hadn't gone out, I don't know how this person's life
would have we would be very different. But all the
(31:47):
tweet said was arrested and it was from James Buck.
And if you remember, that tweet came from James Buck
after he had been taken into custody by Egyptian authorities.
He had attended an anti government protest and was arrested
as a result. So he sends out this tweet, His
friends see it, and then they start spreading the word
(32:07):
around and quit. Before you know it, everyone has heard
about this uh this tweet going out, and it brings
the attention of the United States government to the case,
and eventually the outcry pressures the Egyptian authorities to release Buck,
who then sends out another tweet free. Pretty awesome. So yeah, interesting,
(32:28):
interesting story. I remember when that broke, and I think
it was right around that time where I was really thinking,
maybe this is more than just a way of me
expressing any random thought that pops into my head that
I can whittle down two characters. So May two thousand eight,
Twitter holds around of funding and secures fifteen million dollars,
(32:50):
which is interesting when you think this is before Twitter
had any sort of business plan that I was aware of.
It was part of the joke at the time, wasn't it. Yeah, yeah,
they were. They were raising money, but and they were
spending money, but there was no way of making money
with Twitter. Everyone agreed that it was important that it
was useful, that people love the service. They were willing
(33:11):
to spend hours of their day collectively, maybe not all
at once, but you know, if you they add up,
they spent a lot of time on the service. But
there wasn't any way of monetizing that at the moment. Yeah,
there wasn't even any plan to begin that that they
were talking about the public to it anyway. Yeah, yeah,
they might have had some ideas about advertising or promoted
tweets or whatever, but that was all internal. None of
(33:33):
that was was it was communicated outward, and so it
just became this. The two big jokes about Twitter were
is the service down? And how the heck are they
going to make money? Why are people investing millions of
dollars in this thing that that so far has no
way of making money making money um? And and that
that that fail rate was so large that the company
(33:54):
started its own standalone blog to give users status updates
on downtime, because, as anyone who has been kind of
addicted to Twitter knows, it's it's very distressing when when
you would see that fail whale, which, by the way,
I think I think the fail whale might even be
retired now it is it is. I've got a note
on that later on. But but but some but some
(34:15):
introduction to to the fail whale. I want to do
to do a quick side note, um, the fail whale,
which if you have never seen it before is a
picture of these kind of cute little birds carrying this
cute little whale in in this in this net and
they're flying the whale over over the seas, and and
it was Twitter's four O four page for a very
long time. I'm a debut sometime around around two eight UM.
(34:39):
It had been created by this artist and designer Yeing
lou Um who just made it as like a virtual
birthday card to send to friends in other locations around
the world. She she didn't even have any intent of
monetizing it for a very long time. The birds, she says,
we're working against all odds to make the impossible happen
in her case, particularly being with these far away for
(35:00):
ends of hers. But eventually she thought it was keute
enough that she put up on I stock photo and
that's where Stone grabbed it. And it became so iconic
that I mean that that she's had like fan clubs
and T shirts and crazy merchandise made like drinks and
club events have been named after her. Fail Whale. Yeah. Well,
I remember when when I first found out that that
(35:20):
was the the term the fail whale, Like I knew
that the whale was the four oh four picture. I
must have seen it a dozen times before anyone had
called it the fail whale too, and I was like, oh,
that is cute. So yeah, back in the day, the
fail whale popped up pretty much any time Twitter servers
got overloaded, which but as the as the service began
(35:41):
to gain popularity, they brought more servers onto the whole
the whole product, but often the use would outstrip the capacity,
especially spikes. Yeah, like any any event that would have
a lot of activity around it, so things like you
pretty much knew that your event had made it when
you made Twitter crash, right, So south By Southwest was
(36:03):
a big one because you had a lot of the
heavy users of Twitter all in one place at one time,
all active. But other big events, things like the Oscars,
Super Bowl, you know it loves sporting events. Ce S
was another one, big one. Yeah, So anytime any any
company had a big announcement, Apple, Apple was famous for
(36:25):
making Twitter crash. Anytime Steve Jobs was going to take
the stage or get it, Twitter is gonna go down.
So you know that that was you know, it was
a reality for a long time. These days, it's pretty
rare to see Twitter not working. They've they've definitely built
out the redundancy in the capacity quite a bit. And um,
I can't remember the last time when I tried to
(36:46):
use Twitter and it was down. In fact, I can
remember more frequently times when I was trying to reach
Google services and Google Services were down or Facebook was down,
But I can't remember the last time Twitter was down.
It probably wasn't even that long ago. I just wasn't.
I just wasn't using when it happened. But at any rate, Uh.
In August two thousand eight, that's when the next huge
event happens. That's when tech Stuffs episode on Twitter publishes,
(37:08):
which submits Twitter as a real thing. So west thing
that was that was pretty but yeah, yeah, you know
once yeah yeah, I mean, like, you know, A T
and T was nothing until we covered them last year,
So um, we're hubris. So October six eight, that's when
(37:29):
co founder Jack Dorsey steps down as the CEO of Twitter.
Now he had been acting as CEO for a while,
but he ends up becoming the chairman of the board. Meanwhile,
the chairman of the board, Evan Williams, becomes the CEO.
So they do what I call the old corporate switcher
root they just switched places. Now. Uh. One of the
(37:51):
articles I read it was from the New York Times
and actually cited employees saying Dorsey was not the easiest
man to work for that his he's he was, he
was brilliant, but his leadership skills were, or maybe his
personnel skills of being able to handle personal relationships over
you know, that it was just rough that if things
(38:12):
weren't going well, it made the employment process uncomfortable. Maybe
his vision was terrific, but his day to day running
of the company was less than ideal something like that,
at least from the employee standpoint. Right. So Williams takes
over and Dorsey ends up being the chairman of the board,
and according to at least some of the articles I read,
(38:34):
Dorsey's uh, Dorset's change meant that he was no longer
really involved in the company in any day to day
But Dorsey was working on some other stuff too. So
we'll talk about that later, because we have reached the
point where we are going to conclude this episode. We
are going to pick up and UH and explain what
(38:56):
happens after this switcheroo. A lot of stuff happens in
twit history, but guys, if you have any suggestions for
topics that we should cover here on tech Stuff, let
us know. Maybe there's a company you've always wanted to
hear about that we haven't covered, or maybe it's a
technology or maybe it's just some sort of trend in technology.
Anything is is available, Just let us know. Send us
(39:20):
a message on email. Our address is tech Stuff at
Discovery dot com, or you can drop us a line
on one of the many social networks that we like
to hang out on Twitter, why do you know, Yeah,
at tech Stuff hs W for Twitter, and we're also
tech Stuff HSW on Facebook and the Tumblers. So come
(39:40):
check us out, be part of this, and we will
talk to you again really soon for more on this
and bouthands of other topics. Does it has to works
dot com
Get in test with technology with Text Stuff from stuff
dot com. Hey everyone, and welcome to text Stuff. I'm
Jonathan Strickland, and and we're going to try and bring
you this podcast in characters are fewer. I don't think
that's an accurate description. But we are talking about Twitter today, Yes,
(00:27):
we are. In fact, anyone who knows me knows that
that would be impossible for me to express any thought
in characters or fewer. Well, you you do it pretty frequently.
I mean you're on Twitter. You have multiple Twitter accounts. Yes,
that's why I have to link like eight tweets in
a row for one thought. That's true. You do that thing, yeah,
do um. But anyway, yes, we're gonna talk about Twitter.
And for those of you who have been listening to
(00:49):
Text Stuff for years and years and years, you might say,
well hang on there. I seem to recall back in
the dark days, way back before you guys had any
idea of how you were doing podcasting, that you tried
to tackle Twitter before, and to you, I say, hey,
words can hurt. Twitter was the topic of the twelfth
ever episode of tech Stuff, way back on August four,
(01:11):
two thousan episode, and now we're up to almost six hundred. Ye.
But yeah, we talked in that episode about the technology
of Twitter, what what it actually was, and back then
it was in its still pretty young days, and we
thought now it would be fun to talk about the
actual story of the company itself. Right because in the
(01:32):
intervening time period, as of February, which is when we
are recording this podcast, Twitter has two hundred and forty
one million monthly active users who send some five hundred
million tweets per day. Yeah. That's uh, that's pretty heavy volume.
And if you had asked me back then when we
first did the Twitter podcast, if I thought that it
was ever going to get that big, I probably would
(01:55):
have laughed in your face because at that point I
had only been using Twitter for a little while. But
we'll get in to when we both started using Twitter
as we go through this podcast, and that that big.
And I do want to say also, that widespread because
only thirty three of Twitter's accounts are from the US. Yeah,
and that's a big deal. In fact, it's played a
huge role in some world shaping events actually, and we'll
(02:16):
talk about that too. Um, and might as well say,
this is gonna be two episodes because it's a long story,
so we doesn't want to do a like an epic
one and a half hour episode of tech stuff, so
we're going to split them up. But the other interesting
thing about Twitter and it's early days is that it's
actually kind of controversial. It's not just a simple story.
(02:37):
If you go and look at most of the uh
the accounts of the early days of Twitter, you hear
about three co founders, and that would be Jack Dorsey
or at Jack on Twitter, Evan Williams at e V
or at ev on Twitter, and Christopher biz Stone or
at biz on Twitter. So, uh that that's like the
(02:58):
official story is, those are the three people who co
founded Twitter. But if you look into it a little
more deeply, you'll see some other names pop up, other
people who were instrumental in the early days, including someone
named Noah Glass, who, according to at least some people,
should at least be considered another co founder. Um, and
we'll explain, you know, the whole controversy behind that story too.
(03:21):
It's pretty interesting stuff. Uh. This was all stuff that
I was completely unaware of back when I did the
first episode of Twitter, because none of a lot of
people were talking about the actual early days. In fact,
a lot of people were skeptical that this thing was
going to stick around for very long. Sure it wasn't
so big yet that people had started to really do
these sort of interesting inner looks and mini biographies and
(03:42):
stuff like yeah, yeah, Well, it hadn't been around long
enough for it to really accrue much of a story
at that point, unless you had been at south By
Southwest and then thought that it was the most amazing
thing in the world. So the story of Twitter actually
begins with a different company called Odio, and Odio was
a company that was looking into creating a platform for podcasting,
(04:03):
and it was kind of similar in a way to Twitter,
because in the early days of Twitter, it was very
much focused on using your phone to send out messages.
Uh Odeo was looking at creating a product that was
more about allowing you to create a voicemail message that
would then be converted into an MP three file and
hosted on the web, so you could create a podcast
(04:25):
that way if you wanted to. You could actually dial
into this and create a long message that then would
be converted into an MP three and hosted. And they thought, well,
this is a great way of getting giving people the
power of broadcasting. They can actually sit down and do
exactly what Lauren and I are doing right now. We're
talking into a microphone and we're having it recorded. Then
we can broadcast it out and uh. There were some
(04:48):
problems in those early days with this product. One was
that it launched in two thousand five, just a little
bit before another big podcasting product launched, just iTunes. Yeah,
iTunes the the platform that defined podcasting in those early days.
Now these days, you can obviously get podcasts through lots
(05:08):
of different programs, lots of different podcast catchers, but iTunes
for a very long time was pretty much the only
game in town because so many people subscribe to it
that everything else was like a teeny tiny slice of
the pie. And beyond that, the other story was that
all these people at Odeo were saying, you know, we
(05:29):
work really hard on this product all the time, but
none of us are using it. Bad sign So if
you are not, If you are an engineer and you're
working on a product you know and you're not using it,
that's what Google calls dog fooding, where the people over
at Google use the products that they're working on. Um,
if if no one's doing that, that's a bad sign
(05:50):
and suggest that perhaps you won't be able to find
customers either. So while all this is going on, I mean,
it was clearly a stressful time at Odeo. There were
some other people who had ideas for potential other uses
of SMS technology, that short messaging service technology, including a
(06:11):
Mr Jack Dorsey. As I recall, yeah, all of all
of the people that we mentioned at the top of
the show as being these these founders or controversial founders
of Twitter were involved with Odeo at the time. Yes, yeah,
In fact, some of them actually had come over from Google. Uh.
Evan Williams was the founder of a little program called
or a little service called Blogger, which got acquired by
(06:31):
Google made him a multi millionaire. He then left Google
to be one of the co founders of Odeo and
the CEO I believe, Yeah, and Biz also was with
Google before Odeo. And Jack Dorsey was a web developer,
and so Mr Noah Glass was the one who had
come up with this technology that that created that platform, Yeah, exactly.
(06:53):
And so Dorsey had this other idea, and he had
been kicking it around for a while. Actually, he had
this idea of allowing people to share just a really
brief status update, just kind of like what's going on
with their life. At that very moment, Twitter was almost
called status that's s T A T dot us in fact,
and Dorsey has talked about how fond he is of
(07:15):
those kind of little kitchy web naming Yeah, where you
can where you can make the the top level domain
be the completion of whatever your product um But he
he says that he had first come up with the
idea way back in July of two thousand, just a
couple of months into his use of live journal, which
was a pretty new thing at the time. His concept
(07:37):
was to make a and I quote a more live
live journal, real time up to date from the road,
akin to updating your A I M. Status from wherever
you are and sharing it. So he was looking into like,
this is a great idea. I know, this is a
great idea. This is going to resonate with people. People
are going to be addicted to this. I just don't
know where to put it. I have no idea where. Yeah,
(07:58):
he toyed with implementing it in a whole bunch of
different bits of software that he was working on, and
his cohorts at Odeo were working on and it just
kind of didn't take off for six years. Yeah, he
eventually was able to talk to Noah Glass and explain
the idea in a way that Glass was able to
to latch onto it. In fact, if you read interviews
(08:18):
with Glass and with Dorsey, uh, they talk about how
it was this kind of crazy take the guy out
to lunch and explain it. And then yeah, but why
would anyone want to do that? No, no, no, no no, seriously,
people are gonna want to do them. Yeah, but but
why are people going to want to do that? And
eventually Glass saw the light, you know, something switched on
in his mind. He said, yeah, this is we could
(08:39):
totally implement this. We could create a system where you
could broadcast out a message to a network of people
who follow you. Why don't we do that? And so um,
Glass ended up kind of becoming the chief evangelist of
this idea, this product idea, which still was not an
official thing with Odeo. So they decide Dorsey and Glass
along with a third fellow named Florian Webber, to present
(09:02):
this idea to the business owners at Odeo. So Evan
Williams and Biz Stone and kind of say, look, this
is an idea we have for a different kind of product.
We think that there's a lot of potential here. Our
podcast platform doesn't seem to really be going anywhere. Why
don't we do this because otherwise was our company gonna do? Right?
And that was in February of two thousand six, and
(09:25):
the product that they were that they were recommending was
specifically called Twitter and that is spelled t W T
t R. Yeah. Yeah, because every single character space is valuable,
So get rid of those vowels. You know. Actually, I've
actually seen some tweets that are written in the style
as if they were all following that philosophy, just dropping
(09:46):
all the vowels. It's it's frightening how well you can
start to read those once you practice a little bit. Yeah,
the human brain is terrific, Like, so don't understand that
text speak that the kids are all crazy about. Yeah, lulls.
So anyway, Yeah, February two thousand six, this idea gets
a little bit of traction. And while the response was
not immediately this is what we're going to do from
(10:09):
here on out, essentially, Glass and Dorsey and Webber got
the go ahead to start working on this product, and
so they did and they began to launch it very
gradually once they started building the actual UH technology out.
In fact, Glass says that for a while he was
running the entire service of Twitter off of his laptop,
(10:31):
like it wasn't a server. It lived on his laptop,
and his laptop had to be on and plugged in
and everything and everything was funneled through there. And if
you're not really familiar with especially the early days of Twitter,
keep in mind we're talking two thousand six, that's before
the iPhone comes out, so this is before smartphones. We're
not talking about an app that allows you to UH
(10:52):
to look at Twitter and follow back on that SMS exactly,
just text messages, the same source stuff you would use
if you were to text a friend. So you could
either dial in a a special number and send a
text to that number and then it would just broadcast
out to all of the people who follow you on Twitter,
or you could post on the web client. You could
(11:14):
go to a web page, which you know people still
do occasionally, they'll still go to the Twitter web page
and type stuff in online on their desktop, But there
wasn't any kind of smartphone app interface at this point,
so it was really early days. So Glass was put
in charge of this project and they kind of worked
(11:34):
on this for a while until about March twenty one,
two thousand and six, when the service was actually ready
to support a tweet, and that's when the very first
tweet was written. It was sent by by Jack at
Jack Dorsey and uh, and here it is, guys. I mean,
if you this rivals the first video on YouTube for
(11:55):
like colossal importance, Jack's first Twitter was just setting up
my Twitter. That's Twitter, t W T t R. You know,
like we said earlier, there's a period in there too.
Oh yes, yeah he did. He did use the character
of a period as well. So um yeah, so if
you when I made that YouTube joke, that's for anyone
who remembers that the very first video ever uploaded the
(12:18):
YouTube was a Day at the Zoo. Was one of
the YouTube founders taking a video at a local zoo
and then uploading it. So yeah, sometimes these these things
that end up having world changing uh reach, start off
kind of modest of the bang. But that's but that's
okay too. And uh, in case you're wondering, like what
(12:40):
else is going on around this same time that Twitter
first starts to to to be active. Facebook at that
time had just earlier that year set up their public
uh entry into Facebook. In other words, you didn't have
to be a college student to get into Facebook. At
that time. They first started opening it up to a
few of a companies that so, if you're if your
(13:02):
email address had a certain type of private company addressing it,
you could join. And then eventually they opened it up
to the general public. Yeah. Well, well in April of
two thousand six, right, they started opening up that registration
just a month or so after, You're right after, not before.
Thank you, Lauren for keeping us honest. But yes, so
(13:22):
this is early days in the social networking world. Now. Granted,
even in those early days, Facebook still had a pretty
decent headstart, because yeah, it's not like they were new
at that point at all. Yeah, they had had a
lot of colleges involved in that program, and at that
point they had something like six million users. Twitter, after
a few months of it being live, had fewer than
(13:42):
five thousand users. So big big gap there, you can,
you could say, although people were interested in it. In
July two six, there was a really interesting coverage of
Twitter from tech Crunch something. Yeah, Michael Arrington wrote about it,
and uh, in the the article they talked about it
being a group send SMS service. So again this idea
(14:05):
of being able to broadcast out the message to your friends. Now,
this is kind of interesting because if you think of
what Twitter has become, it's a little bit different from
what was how it was first envisioned. Like back in
the day, it might have been something like, you want
to hold a party on the weekend, and you're like,
who wants to go to the pizza party thing? I
want to throw and you just send it out to everybody.
(14:26):
In that way, you don't have to individually send out
text messages to everyone. And that's really how everyone was
billing Twitter as being. You know, this is this is
the way that Twitter should be used. It totally makes sense,
but it's interesting because the way people actually use Twitter
would end up being very different from that. Uh and
in various ways. I mean, a lot of people like
(14:47):
to tell you what they're eating still to this day.
That was a big joke on Twitter for a long time,
but it's I did it recently, took a picture of
a delicious omelet idia and I had to send it out.
But um, yeah, so and then of course we're using
it now for news, and we're using it to uh
to follow celebrities or even interact with people that we
(15:09):
admire when you never would have had that that conduit
open before, or if you're just up to the minute
um networking with with all kinds of people who you
might have never had a chance to talk to. Oh yeah,
I've I've actually been contacted via Twitter to do cool
stuff like to to do a guest appearance on a show,
or to have people give me interesting ideas for shows
(15:31):
that we do. So it's definitely evolved. But what's interesting
is that none of that was really at that point.
Even Mike Arrington, who is, depending upon your point of view,
really good at predicting what's going to work in technology. Uh,
he didn't really touch on that in his article at all.
He actually did compare Twitter to another service that was
(15:53):
called Dodgeball. Now that I think is a little weird
because Dodgeball was more of a location based service and
less of a broadcast a message out service, and Dodgeball
would eventually be acquired by Google. Right. Um it was
it was similar in the way that people were using
it for, uh, for a quick, unobtrusive way to get
(16:13):
in touch with people about something small. Yeah, it's it's
related in the same way that you could say like
MySpace and Facebook were related and that they did similar things,
but they had very different approaches. In fact, maybe even
more different than my Space and Facebook were. But those founders,
after Google bought them out, would go on to create
four Square. All of them left Google. They I hear
(16:36):
a very similar story from the folks who used to
be a blogger and the folks who used to be
with Dodgeball in that once Google acquired the company, satisfaction
kind of dropped out. They just it wasn't a good culture,
it wasn't a mixed Yeah. So they ended up leaving
and founding four Square, which by the way worked out
for them. Um. And then there was another similar service
(16:58):
And anyone who was around in the early days of
Twitter probably has heard of this called Jaiku. It's supposed
to be the combination of the words Japanese and haiku.
It was founded by a couple of Finnish developers, as
in from Finland. Not that they were done, they weren't
finished developers, they were Finnished. I'm just trying to explain.
(17:20):
Lauren just In case people misunderstand me. Um, but yeah,
it used a very similar approach. I mean it was
essentially a a almost identical service, and I actually used
both for a while. Jaiku also would eventually get shuttered.
It would not it would not stand the test of time.
It was just that too many people were using Twitter
and not enough people were using Jaiku, and while the
(17:43):
services were very similar, there wasn't any real reason to
use both, Like, especially at the limited range that Twitter
was operating at the time, it was really only being
populated by um kind of kind of high level, well
connected Silicon Valley sort of types. Yeah, if if you
were around in the very early days of Google Plus,
(18:03):
very similar Like I remember I got invited into the
Google Plus beta like within the first week or two
that it went live, and for a while it felt
like it was just technology owners and technology journalists and
it was awesome. Uh it's still I still very much
enjoy Google Plus, but you know, there's something a little
(18:26):
enticing about being part of this exclusive club. I think
ultimately it's better that it's not exclusive, but you know,
at the same time, it's kind of cool to be
one of the cool kids for like a week, so yeah,
so it's a relatively small scope at the time, and
in fact, the scope was so small that one of
the founders would do something shocking. But we'll get to
(18:46):
that after we take a quick break and thank our sponsors. So, Lauren,
you alluded to something kind of radical that one of
the founders of odio would do, and it upen in
September two thousand and six. It was something that again
another controversial decision in hindsight, At the time, it didn't
(19:08):
seem that controversial, but now it surely does. Which is
that Evan Williams sent out a message to Odio investors
and said that he wanted to buy back the company's
stock from the investors because he didn't see the company
having any real direction. At that point, the podcast platform
had fallen flat and Twitter was still a very young
(19:29):
service a right, only a fewer than five thousand people
had registered for the service and the two months that
it had been available so far. Right. So eventually Williams
convinced the investors to accept the buy back. And so, uh,
there's not really a publicly available figure for how much
this buyback cost Williams out of his own money, but
(19:51):
the estimations are somewhere around the five million dollar mark,
because that's about how much funding Odeo had received earlier,
So five million dollars. But now the question, and it
wasn't the question then, but the question now is did
Williams have any idea how big Twitter was going to become?
And did he make that buying back in anticipation for
this crazy popular service? Was it earnest or was he
(20:15):
plotting ahead? And here's the thing. People describe Williams as
being incredibly uh, methodical, thoughtful, very quiet, very Some would
even use the term mackea Bellian. Uh, but that's quite
a term. It is quite a term. Yeah, that's that's
that's saying something very specific right there. But I think
(20:36):
I think everyone agrees that what Williams said was perfectly honest.
That the service did have fewer than five thousand users.
So there was no way of knowing at that moment
if those five thousand would ever be larger, Like there's
no way of knowing if if they would you know,
top out at twenty. But they did know that people
were using it a lot, and they were using it,
(20:59):
you know, obset Slee is probably being too strong, let's
say frequently but that that people were and and people
inside the company were using it so unlike that that
podcast platform that no one was using. People in the
company were using it so much that Odio had changed
its UH employee agreement to actually pick up their text
messaging fees because people were racking up four D text
(21:22):
message at the time. That was that was a big deal.
That was huge. I mean, no one had unlimited text
plans because who was going to send that many texts?
And they weren't saying necessarily anything, you know, profound. This was, hey,
I had an awesome waffle today, like that kind of stuff.
So there was there's at least some indication that the
service was compelling. Whether or not he knew that the
(21:43):
service was ever going to take off is still up
to a question. Most people, they fall into three camps.
They're either in the camp of, oh, he totally knew
that this was going to be a big thing and
he worked us out of it. Then there's the camp
of I don't think he pushed us out, but I
think I wish I had pushed back more. I wish
I had realized how big this thing was going to be,
(22:06):
because I I really would have liked a piece of that,
and then there's a third camp. It's like, No, he
was probably being very much upfront and honest, and he
hoped that it would become a big thing, but there
was no way, no guarantee at the time. Although I
don't know it's now that I think about it. Williams
proceeded to change Odia's name to Obvious Corp, which kind
(22:26):
of obviously this is gonna be huge. I guess there's
a lot of interpretations we can have in hindsight, but yes,
that is true. He did change the name Odio to
Obvious Corps. And he also did something else that that
again can be a little controversial. He fired Noah Glass. Now,
without Glass, I think most people would agree Twitter never
would have happened because Glass was constantly pushing for Twitter
(22:49):
to be a real product from Odio and he uh,
he was championing it. He was working on the product
all the time. He was trying to sell it to
the rest of Odio, and no one ever made the
reasons for the firing public. Yeah, I mean it's it's
we've we've both heard that Williams and Glass didn't apparently
get along very well. It was a personality class very
(23:10):
big personality clash in the sense that Williams was this
very kind of quiet, methodical person and Glass is known
as being loud and passionate. Some people called him volatile,
that he could lose his temper when things were not
going very well, and that the clash of those personalities
meant that it was just impossible for the two to
co coincide. They just could not coexist, should say, although
(23:34):
glass Is also said about it that he he suspects
he was pushed out by Williams because he Glass originally
wanted to spend Twitter out of odeo CEO of program. Yeah,
he said that I have this idea. I think Twitter
can stand alone as its own thing. I'll be I'll
be glad to be in charge of it. And at
the time he was thinking, oh, this is no problem
because no one else is expressing interest in this product idea,
(23:58):
and I'm really interested in it, so I'll take it over.
Everyone will be happy. But then that's not the way
it unfolded. So Yeah, he's definitely um done some interviews
more recently where he's kind of uh, you know it.
I mean, it's it's clear that he hurt runs deep there.
The pain is deep, because he says that it was
(24:18):
like being betrayed by your friends, and that he even
left San Francisco for a few years, went to Los
Angeles because he couldn't even bear the thought of working
in that industry anymore because it was such a painful experience. Um.
He has since come back to San Francisco and has
worked on other projects, uh, to varying degrees of success,
(24:38):
nothing obviously as successful as Twitter has been. Right um.
Over the next few months, the company would continue to
kind of slowly and quietly grow until until this insane
thing happened at south By Southwest. Yeah, March two thousand seven.
It debuts it south By Southwest and this is uh.
(24:58):
You know. South Southwest is one of those conferences that
if you are able to make a big splash and
get a lot of buzz, you are in a great
position because there's so many high powered executives and employees
from various companies who all are very influential in their
own right. If they start talking about your product, then
(25:19):
you are poised to make a big splash, at least
in the technology sector. It might take a while for
that to spill out to other groups, but in technology,
you are going to you're gonna perform like Gangbusters. Yeah,
and it won their Web Award that year. Yeah, so
I mean they definitely made a strong showing. And you know,
(25:39):
I hear tales about that south By Southwest, about people
you know, immediately getting addicted to this service Twitter and
and all joining their own Like everyone at south By
Southwest created their own little you you know, exclusive club,
a whole bunch of little people just sitting around in
rooms tweeting at each other. So the next thing, you know,
you know, like the CEO of Twitter is getting messages
(26:00):
from the CEO of Facebook, who's also getting messages from
you know, it's and it becomes like this kind of
crazy exclusive club. And it did a lot to raise
the awareness of Twitter. Although even at this point in
two thousand seven, I had heard of it but knew
nothing about it, so I was largely ignorant of what
(26:21):
Twitter was at this point. I think I had one
friend who was on Twitter who was talking about it
being really cool, but I was kind of like, whatever,
I really can't handle having another social media thing right now. Yeah,
I mean I was still busy on my Space. I
didn't join Facebook till two thousand seven, I did so
much live journaling. I actually did do live journaling too,
now that I think about it. But yeah, so April
(26:43):
thousand seven, that's when Twitter uh incorporated, right right right?
They spun off of Obvious Corpse that month into their
own separate company. And yeah, so just like a month,
maybe a month and a half after south By Southwest,
So at this point you could probably hear Noah Glass
crying out and be pretty bad. And then only a
couple of months later they would hold their first round
(27:05):
of um venture capitalist funding. Yep. And the estimate amount
because again this was a private company so they don't
have to release their figures to the public, but the
estimated amount of money they raised was around five point
seven million dollars, so already right on par with what
Odio was raising back in the day. So the company
that you know, Twitter originally was just gonna be a
(27:25):
product of Odio. It wasn't going to be its own thing,
and now it's until it definitely was. Yeah, it's already
rivaling the company that that's that spawned it. Another big
happening in two thousand and seven, in August um the
hashtag debut It was suggested by user Christmas Cina at
Christmasina who suggested it in in a tweet. He just said,
(27:46):
how do you feel about using pound for groups as
in pound bar camp and then message, which made it
way easier to search for specific things on Twitter. Now,
at this point, Twitter didn't even have its own uh
in rated search. You could search tweets through other means,
but using the hashtag made it a lot easier because otherwise,
if you just searched a random term, it would pull
(28:09):
up everything on Twitter that had that word in it.
With the hashtag, it made it much more easy to
uh to find something specific. Yeah, so, yeah, it was.
It was a good idea. In fact, that's another interesting thing.
I didn't really touch on it in my research, but
a lot of the innovations of Twitter come to us
because of the way users use Twitter. It's not something
that was built by the engineers and then filtered out.
(28:31):
It was that people saw ways of increasing Twitter's utility,
and then Twitter said, yeah, we should totally make that
real like official. It's a greater than some of its
parts kind of gig. Yeah. Yeah, some people get a
little more cynical about the approach of that more like
Twitter is very good at stealing the ideas that users have,
(28:51):
but let's be we'll be generous, uh at any rate.
And on in October nine seven, Google acquires Jaiku. So
you aready know the writings on the wall, and Google
buys your company. It seems to be I mean, it's
a joke, but it's also if you look at the
the number of services that Google has introduced and then
look at the number of services that Google has uh
(29:13):
eventually closed the doors on, it's it's a it's not
a great batting average for Google. Right, It's not like
there's a ton of of services that were around back
then that Google introduced that are still around. They tend
to cannibalize a little bit and steal little bits of
companies and keep the people in the services that they
really like and then kind of go ball to the
(29:35):
whole thing. Yeah, you might see some of the technology
incorporated and some of the other stuff, like Google Docs
keeps getting more and more uh advanced and complex, partly
because some of those features were cannibalized from other services.
At any rate. Uh. People debated for a while which
service was going to win out Twitter or Jaiku, but
(29:56):
Twitter already had a headstart with users. It was much
better known in United States, had gone through that explosion
thanks to the south by Southwest, and so it would
be a few years, but eventually Google would announce it
would stop supporting Jaiku, closing it down in January two
thousand twelve. So it did stick around for a really
long time, longer than I thought it did. It wasn't
until I did this research that I realized it was
(30:17):
still around as late as January two twelve. I thought it,
oh yeah, um, But around around this time, in late
two thousand seven, Twitter had all of eight employees still
and they were still very much in development despite all
of this terrific success that they were finding. Throughout the
course of the year, it was offline for a total
of nearly six days for maintenance and overload of servers. Yeah.
(30:39):
In fact, um that also became a running joke, especially
in the early days of Twitter, about how frequently is
Twitter down as opposed to you know what's going on
on Twitter? Like is Twitter still working right now? Would
be a joke, and it would continue to be a
joke for a while. But we'll talk more about that extensively. Actually. Yeah,
So incredibly important day wers history. March two thousand eight,
(31:04):
monumental day for Twitter. That was when I sent my
first tweet from the John Strickland account at John Strickland.
That's me, Uh, and I wrote the article. Here's the
tweet says. You know, I wrote the article on how
Twitter works months ago, and yet I'm just getting into
it now. And uh. Since then, I've written about fifteen
thousand more tweets, mostly about what I was eating. April
(31:27):
two eight, one of the most famous tweets is sent
in that month, and we're talking about actually famous, not
not joke famous. This, this is for real from a person. This,
this tweet affected this person's life phenomenally because if it
hadn't gone out, I don't know how this person's life
would have we would be very different. But all the
(31:47):
tweet said was arrested and it was from James Buck.
And if you remember, that tweet came from James Buck
after he had been taken into custody by Egyptian authorities.
He had attended an anti government protest and was arrested
as a result. So he sends out this tweet, His
friends see it, and then they start spreading the word
(32:07):
around and quit. Before you know it, everyone has heard
about this uh this tweet going out, and it brings
the attention of the United States government to the case,
and eventually the outcry pressures the Egyptian authorities to release Buck,
who then sends out another tweet free. Pretty awesome. So yeah, interesting,
(32:28):
interesting story. I remember when that broke, and I think
it was right around that time where I was really thinking,
maybe this is more than just a way of me
expressing any random thought that pops into my head that
I can whittle down two characters. So May two thousand eight,
Twitter holds around of funding and secures fifteen million dollars,
(32:50):
which is interesting when you think this is before Twitter
had any sort of business plan that I was aware of.
It was part of the joke at the time, wasn't it. Yeah, yeah,
they were. They were raising money, but and they were
spending money, but there was no way of making money
with Twitter. Everyone agreed that it was important that it
was useful, that people love the service. They were willing
(33:11):
to spend hours of their day collectively, maybe not all
at once, but you know, if you they add up,
they spent a lot of time on the service. But
there wasn't any way of monetizing that at the moment. Yeah,
there wasn't even any plan to begin that that they
were talking about the public to it anyway. Yeah, yeah,
they might have had some ideas about advertising or promoted
tweets or whatever, but that was all internal. None of
(33:33):
that was was it was communicated outward, and so it
just became this. The two big jokes about Twitter were
is the service down? And how the heck are they
going to make money? Why are people investing millions of
dollars in this thing that that so far has no
way of making money making money um? And and that
that that fail rate was so large that the company
(33:54):
started its own standalone blog to give users status updates
on downtime, because, as anyone who has been kind of
addicted to Twitter knows, it's it's very distressing when when
you would see that fail whale, which, by the way,
I think I think the fail whale might even be
retired now it is it is. I've got a note
on that later on. But but but some but some
(34:15):
introduction to to the fail whale. I want to do
to do a quick side note, um, the fail whale,
which if you have never seen it before is a
picture of these kind of cute little birds carrying this
cute little whale in in this in this net and
they're flying the whale over over the seas, and and
it was Twitter's four O four page for a very
long time. I'm a debut sometime around around two eight UM.
(34:39):
It had been created by this artist and designer Yeing
lou Um who just made it as like a virtual
birthday card to send to friends in other locations around
the world. She she didn't even have any intent of
monetizing it for a very long time. The birds, she says,
we're working against all odds to make the impossible happen
in her case, particularly being with these far away for
(35:00):
ends of hers. But eventually she thought it was keute
enough that she put up on I stock photo and
that's where Stone grabbed it. And it became so iconic
that I mean that that she's had like fan clubs
and T shirts and crazy merchandise made like drinks and
club events have been named after her. Fail Whale. Yeah. Well,
I remember when when I first found out that that
(35:20):
was the the term the fail whale, Like I knew
that the whale was the four oh four picture. I
must have seen it a dozen times before anyone had
called it the fail whale too, and I was like, oh,
that is cute. So yeah, back in the day, the
fail whale popped up pretty much any time Twitter servers
got overloaded, which but as the as the service began
(35:41):
to gain popularity, they brought more servers onto the whole
the whole product, but often the use would outstrip the capacity,
especially spikes. Yeah, like any any event that would have
a lot of activity around it, so things like you
pretty much knew that your event had made it when
you made Twitter crash, right, So south By Southwest was
(36:03):
a big one because you had a lot of the
heavy users of Twitter all in one place at one time,
all active. But other big events, things like the Oscars,
Super Bowl, you know it loves sporting events. Ce S
was another one, big one. Yeah, So anytime any any
company had a big announcement, Apple, Apple was famous for
(36:25):
making Twitter crash. Anytime Steve Jobs was going to take
the stage or get it, Twitter is gonna go down.
So you know that that was you know, it was
a reality for a long time. These days, it's pretty
rare to see Twitter not working. They've they've definitely built
out the redundancy in the capacity quite a bit. And um,
I can't remember the last time when I tried to
(36:46):
use Twitter and it was down. In fact, I can
remember more frequently times when I was trying to reach
Google services and Google Services were down or Facebook was down,
But I can't remember the last time Twitter was down.
It probably wasn't even that long ago. I just wasn't.
I just wasn't using when it happened. But at any rate, Uh.
In August two thousand eight, that's when the next huge
event happens. That's when tech Stuffs episode on Twitter publishes,
(37:08):
which submits Twitter as a real thing. So west thing
that was that was pretty but yeah, yeah, you know
once yeah yeah, I mean, like, you know, A T
and T was nothing until we covered them last year,
So um, we're hubris. So October six eight, that's when
(37:29):
co founder Jack Dorsey steps down as the CEO of Twitter.
Now he had been acting as CEO for a while,
but he ends up becoming the chairman of the board. Meanwhile,
the chairman of the board, Evan Williams, becomes the CEO.
So they do what I call the old corporate switcher
root they just switched places. Now. Uh. One of the
(37:51):
articles I read it was from the New York Times
and actually cited employees saying Dorsey was not the easiest
man to work for that his he's he was, he
was brilliant, but his leadership skills were, or maybe his
personnel skills of being able to handle personal relationships over
you know, that it was just rough that if things
(38:12):
weren't going well, it made the employment process uncomfortable. Maybe
his vision was terrific, but his day to day running
of the company was less than ideal something like that,
at least from the employee standpoint. Right. So Williams takes
over and Dorsey ends up being the chairman of the board,
and according to at least some of the articles I read,
(38:34):
Dorsey's uh, Dorset's change meant that he was no longer
really involved in the company in any day to day
But Dorsey was working on some other stuff too. So
we'll talk about that later, because we have reached the
point where we are going to conclude this episode. We
are going to pick up and UH and explain what
(38:56):
happens after this switcheroo. A lot of stuff happens in
twit history, but guys, if you have any suggestions for
topics that we should cover here on tech Stuff, let
us know. Maybe there's a company you've always wanted to
hear about that we haven't covered, or maybe it's a
technology or maybe it's just some sort of trend in technology.
Anything is is available, Just let us know. Send us
(39:20):
a message on email. Our address is tech Stuff at
Discovery dot com, or you can drop us a line
on one of the many social networks that we like
to hang out on Twitter, why do you know, Yeah,
at tech Stuff hs W for Twitter, and we're also
tech Stuff HSW on Facebook and the Tumblers. So come
(39:40):
check us out, be part of this, and we will
talk to you again really soon for more on this
and bouthands of other topics. Does it has to works
dot com
TechStuff News
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Karah Preiss
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