the invention of twitter

THEINVENTIONOF TWITTER

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How Twitter's owners and top executives say Twitter was founded is different from

how Twitter was actually founded. Mainly, the offi cial version leaves out the role of a major co-founder. Some early Twitter investors also wonder if it also leaves out a scandal.

Twitter is now worth more than $5 billion — and climbing toward $10 billion on secondary markets — so it's worth setting the story straight.The offi cial telling of Twitter's founding goes like this. Ex-Googler Evan Williams had a startup called Odeo. It was going to be a podcasting platform. Evan asked his friend, another ex-Googler named Biz Stone, to join him. When Apple launched iTunes podcasting, and made Odeo's podcasting platform irrelevant, Evan and Biz and an Odeo employee named Jack Dorsey decided to create something called Twitter instead. Odeo's investors didn't like Twitter, and Evan did them a huge favor by buying back all their stock and making them whole.

According to interviews with about a dozen early investors and employees, the story of how Twitter was actually founded begins with an entrepreneur named Noah Glass, who started Odeo in his apartment.

The story begins about six years ago. "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' 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'. 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 known by friends as "Rabble,"] and Rabble's wife Gabba. Mostly it was the four of us working out of the apartment."Early Odeo employee Blaine Cook would become Twitter's fi rst CTO. Next, Odeo moved into an offi ce 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.

Jack had an idea for acompletely differentproduct that revolvedaround "status" - what people were doing at agiven time.

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 co-founder 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' Twitter team. And it really was Glass' 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 co-founder, 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

Jack had an idea for acompletely differentproduct that revolvedaround "status" - what people were doing at agiven time.

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."

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 totaling 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.

At a board meeting for Odeo that summer, Noah Glass presented Twitter to Odeo's

directors. They hardly blinked at it. Then, one day in September 2006, Odeo's CEO Evan Williams wrote a letter to Odeo's investors. In it, Williams told them that the company was going nowhere, that he felt bad about that, and that he would like to buy back their shares so they wouldn't take a loss. In his letter to Odeo's investors, Williams wrote this about Twitter:

“By the way, Twitter (http://twitter.com), which you may have read about, is one of the pieces of value that I see in Odeo, but it's much too early to tell what's there. Almost two months after launch, Twitter has less than 5,000 registered users. I will continue to invest in Twitter, but it's hard to say it justifies the venture investment Odeo certainly holds -- especially since that investment was for a different market altogether.”

Evan proposed buying back Odeo investors' stock, and, eventually, the investors agreed to the buyback. So Evan bought the company — and Twitter. The amount he paid has never been reported. Multiple investors, who had combined to put $5 million into Odeo, say Evan made them whole. Five years later, assets of the company the original Odeo investors sold for approximately $5 million are now

worth at least 1000x more: $5 billion. How do those investors feel now?

In general, the answer is that most feel at peace now — if only now. Some are wistful. Others are hurt. Speaking to one or two, you can detect a suspicion that they were somehow conned by Williams. Most echoed the sentiments of James Hong, the co-founder of HotOrNot.com and an Odeo angel investor. Hong told us, “Obviously, I wish what happened hadn’t happened. There was a dark period where I didn’t want to hear about Twitter.”

Many of the Odeo investors still appreciate Williams’ gesture. “At the time, it was well received as a gracious act,” says one individual investor, Don Hutchinson. “Often when you’re investing in early stage companies you end up with a dead loss.”

Some of the investors who sold Odeo and Twitter to Evan Williams for a few million dollars wonder about his intentions at the time. Had Evan tricked them into thinking Twitter wasn’t worth much, when he already knew it would be a gold mine? One investor asked: “Could Evan have known this would be the world’s best thing ever and hid it while

Everyone said the twohad clashing personalities.Basically: Glass is loud and Williams is quiet.

Everyone said the twohad clashing personalities.Basically: Glass is loud and Williams is quiet.

re-capitalizing the company?

The truth is we’ll probably never really know whether Williams actually thought he had the next big thing when he downplayed Twitter to investors. On the one hand, by early as the summer of 2006, there was already plenty of evidence that some users found Twitter impossibly addictive. Noah Glass says that, early on, mobile carriers told him they’d never seen so much SMS activity than they did with Twitter. One early Odeo employee, who preferred not to be named, says “Ev decided there was something interesting enough in Twitter that he wanted to buy all the assets and buy everyone out.”

On the other hand, Twitter really only did have a few thousand users at the time Evan bought it and the rest of Odeo back from investors. Blaine Cook told us that there was a meeting during the summer of 2006 about whether or not to just turn the whole thing off. Everyone agrees it wasn’t obvious that Twitter would a huge hit until six months later, in the spring of 2007, when it took over the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. It's worth noting that months after buying Odeo back from its investors, Evan Williams offered a select few of them a chance to buy into Twitter at a a $25 million valuation.

Tim O'Reilly, an Odeo investor who also who runs O'Reilly Media and its famous Web 2.0 conferences, reflects: "It's certainly possible that Ev is more Machiavellian than he appears. I don't know. I take it at face value that he was doing what he thought was best. It's very easy to look back and say, 'Wow, I'd like to have a bigger piece of that.' It's very easy to say

that." Either way, Odeo's investors agreed to let Williams buy them out. The first thing Evan Williams did when he bought Odeo back from investors was to change its name to Obvious Corp.

What he did next was shocking to everyone involved. He fired the man who was Odeo's founder and Twitter's biggest champion, Noah Glass. "I remember when Noah told me he wasn't going to back to Twitter," says McClure. "I was shocked. We were out at night and he said it looked like he wasn't coming back. He had taken a two-week break and I thought it was just a little break. Hard to hear him say that. It kind of blew my mind because I felt like we all identified with this, and of course I was worried about the team."

Why was this so shocking? Probably because Twitter would not have been created without Glass. Odeo engineer Evan Henshaw-Plath describes Glass, Dorsey, and Florian Webb as Twitter's "actual founders." “Noah got really into it," says Henshaw-Plath. "Seriously obsessive. I-don't-care-if-my-marriage-dies-I'm-focused-on-this into it." "Noah cared a lot about Twitter," says Blaine Cook, the Odeo employee who eventually became Twitter CTO. "If you look at his profile now, it says 'I started this.' And he did."George Zachary, the partner at Charles River Ventures and lead Odeo investor, tells us that while Jack Dorsey is “the real core founder” of Twitter, Noah was a “huge advocate.”

Why did Williams fire Glass? The most common answer we heard is that the two had clashing personalities. Everyone says so. Basically: Glass is loud and Williams is quiet.

"Noah, you can always hear him talking," says McClure. "Ev, you can always hear him thinking." Along these lines, one Odeo employee says that Williams might have fired Glass because Glass was volatile. The employee remembers a time when Glass was "a little hard" on a girl named Crystal. "I think it was a day that he was kind of stressed. He was a little volatile."

Others, including Glass, suggest the reason he might have been pushed out is that he expressed too much interest in running Twitter. “That was the plan — take this thing and spin it off,” he says. “I actually had done all the paperwork and was ready to roll. It was ready to go. That’s probably part of the reason why I’m no longer involved with it. I told [Williams] I would do things differently. When you speak truth to power, the ramifications can go a lot of different ways.” Zachary says that the reason Evan Williams ended up in control of Twitter is that “Evan had the money to be able to buy out the shareholders. Noah did not.”

Almost everyone we talked to seemed pretty sure that Glass walked away from Odeo/Obvious/Twitter with some equity in hand. The truth is that, at first, he did not. Later, perhaps when Twitter was spun out of Obvious, he got some. "I came away with something. If I'd stayed, if it would have gone the other way, I would have come away with a lot lot more."

Glass says the whole mess left him feeling "betrayed." "I felt betrayed by my friends, by my company, by these people around me I trusted and that I had worked hard to create something with. I was a little shell-shocked. I was like, 'Wait...what's the value in building these relationships if this is the result?' So I spent a lot of time by myself. And working on things alone."

When Twitter was still Twttr and just a project at Odeo, Stone would occasionally pitch in and help Jack Dorsey, Florian Weber, and Noah Glass with their project. These days, his official title is Twitter co-founder. He no longer spends much time at Twitter headquarters.

What Biz told Howard Stern sounded different from what all those people told us — especially in the way it left out Noah Glass and Florian Weber. We couldn't help being a little offended for them.

Twitter provides us with a wonderful platform todiscuss/confront societal problems.We trend Justin Bieber instead.- Lauren Leto

When you've got 5 minutes to fill, Twitter is a great way to fill 35 minutes.@mattcutts

LinkedIn is for the people you know. Facebook is for the people you used to know. Twitter is forpeople you want to know.~ Source unknown

The qualities that make Twitter seem inane andhalf-baked are what makes it so powerful.- Jonathan Zittrai

While face-to-face is just as important as ever, now that we've got a new tools let us tightenbonds in between those in-person moments. @chrisbrogan

Given a limit of 140 characters, peopleconsistently reaffirm that creativity is arenewable resource.@biz

TWEETWORTHYDESIGN

The first thing that you’ll notice about the feathered frontmanis that he’s taking flight. This bird is going places.

This bird will now bethe universallyrecognizable symbolof Twitter. No text,bubbled typefaces,or a lowercase “t” to represent Twitter.

Recently, Twitter unveiled its brand new logo. It’s certainly not the first time this has

happened, but the company seems insistent that this is going to be the last change we see for a while.

Join us as we take a look at the new logo, discuss why it’s better or worse and analyze the interesting geometry that was used to create the icon. Is there some hidden magic in using circles to create your logo? Read on to find out.

On June 6, 2012, Twitter pushed out a blog post revealing the future of their brand: the new Twitter bird. Shown above, the thing that you’ll notice instantly about this new take on the feathered frontman is that he’s taking flight. No longer content to glide in a horizontal position, this bird is going places.

Along with the unveiling of the new icon, the folks at Twitter sought to clarify any confusion about how the brand logo will appear henceforth: “Starting today you’ll begin to notice a simplified Twitter bird. From now on, this bird will be the universally recognizable symbol of Twitter. (Twitter is the bird, the bird is Twitter.) There’s no longer a need for text, bubbled typefaces, or a lowercase “t” to represent Twitter.”

It seems that Twitter has joined the ranks of Apple, Nike, Starbucks and Target in the club of companies that are so big that their brand is instantly recognizable without a single letter of text. This simplifies things nicely. The previous versions of the logo were often shown with or without the text, which may or may not have appeared in the same position in relation to the logo.

Though the Twitter logo has gone through a ton of changes, many of which included no bird at all, by my count, there have been five major iterations of the actual Twitter bird formerly known as Larry. (yep, Larry bird.)

Interestingly enough, many of the illustrations that I can find of the original bird actually face to the left, though it seems Twitter played with facing him in either direction. Eventually though, Larry decided that right was right and has been looking that way ever since.

The second version of the bird wasn’t a gradual step but a complete redesign from scratch. This set the bird on the path of slow evolution that brought it where it is today. The second and third iterations are actually fairly similar in shape, they mainly sought to make the bird more cartoony and friendly.

The next step was to drop all that silly cartoon detail and revert to a silhouette look. During the

process, the bird’s shape was streamlined. The feet were removed, the wings redrawn and the beak was made to be less awkwardly curved. Interestingly enough, in this step, the bird was made to look less like it was moving upwards, a step that would be reversed and taken to new heights in the next version.

The newest iteration has, aside from the change of direction, several other notable changes. The wings have one less feather or ridge, the fluff on top has been removed and the enlarged cartoon head has been scaled down considerably and smoothed out into a circle.

There’s something about the geometry of the new Twitter logo that’s interesting. Twitter isn’t trying to hide it but boldly showcases this characteristic in the launch video.As you can clearly see, the new Twitter logo is based heavily on perfect circles. (See right.) So what do you think, gimmick or good design?

This bird will now bethe universallyrecognizable symbolof Twitter. No text,bubbled typefaces,or a lowercase “t” to represent Twitter.

BANG ONTRENDTHE

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MOSTPOPULARTRENDS2013

What trended on Twitter in the UK during 2013? Trending topics help Twitter users discover the hottest emerging topics as they break, making the platform a great placeto keep up-to-date with eventsand discuss the latest news. Here you can see what trended most frequently in the UK in 2013. And remember a trend doesn’t mean it necessarily was a hit...

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#Christmas

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Eid Mubarak

Easter

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National Poetry Day

Happy Diwali

Iain Banks

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Seamus Heaney

Ken Barlow

#RoyalBaby

James Arthur

Thatcher

Richard III

#CityofCulture2017

Syria

Turkey

North Korea

Angelina Jolie

#RememberingCory

Pope

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#September11

#PrayForBoston

James Gandolfini

Justin Beiber

Suarez

Iain Banks

Paul Scholes

Angelina Jolie

SeamusHeany

The Pope

Ken Barlow

James Arthur

Thatcher

Suarez

#LFC

Swansea

Aston Villa

Liverpool

#MUFC

#TransferDeadlineDay

FIFA

Paul Scholes

#ThankYouSirAlex

#Ashes

#FP1

#TheOpen

#NFL

#RedSox

#6Nations

Super Bowl

#Wimbledon

#bbcmarathon

#thankyousachin

#bbctw

#MTVHottest

#BBCQT

#BBCGlasto

Miranda

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#crimewatch

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Syria

#lab13

#CPC13

#EDL

MPs

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Scotland

Thatcher

Tommy Robinson

Happy New Year

#Events #UK News#International News #People #Football #OtherSport#TV#PoliticsKEY

the invention of twitter

Documents

odeo employees

early twitter investors

exgoogler evan williams

dozen early investors

google employee

odeos investors didnt

glass earliest investors

evan henshwawplath