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