The Story of Twitter

The Story of Twitter — page 3 — The Right Idea he original plan was to develop a platform for people to listen to podcasts or recorded au dio files on their MP3 players Software devel oper Noah Glass had started a company called Odeo in 2005 to create that technology and with the fi nancial backing of his friend Evan Williams and others hired a handful of other developers web de signers and engineers to help build the system The Odeo crew including Glass Williams software engineers Blaine Cook and Christopher Biz Stone and web designer Jack Dorsey worked long hours in a San Francisco apartment that had been turned into an office space By July 2005 2 they had created a platform for podcasting that they thought would be the com pany's first product But before their product was ready to be launched Apple an nounced that it had built its own podcasting platform and that the platform would be built into every iPod that the company sold Apple's announcement coupled with a realization that even Odeo employees Co weren't regularly using the technology that they had created to listen to pod casts forced the company to abruptly change its direction Late in 2005 Williams THE STORY OF TWITTER

The Story of Twitter — page 4 — iPod Music Photos Extras Settings Shuffle Songs Now Playing Apple's iPod nano has gone through several generations or models since its introduction in 2005 TWITTER

The Story of Twitter — page 5 — RI challenged the company's 14 employees to come up with new ideas to pursue They broke into small groups and began holding daylong hackathons during which they focused on projects that might lead to the next big thing One of the ideas that emerged from those sessions came from Dorsey He suggested that the company develop a product that would allow people to tell their friends what they were doing at any given time a concept that he called status It was an idea that Dorsey had been thinking about for several years As a teenager he had developed software that allowed taxi drivers bike courier and package delivery trucks to maintain constant real time communication with each other He thought that same software could be combined with instant messaging technology to allow friends to share moment to moment status updates with each other He had sketched out his rough idea for the con cept which he called Stat Us on a notepad in 2001 while he was a student at New York University By the time he joined Odeo in 2006 he still hadn't found the right way to put it into action Although Glass admired Dorsey and considered him to be one of the rising stars in the company he didn't immediately understand why Dorsey was so excited about the idea of instant status updates But one rainy night as he and Dorsey talked while driving home together at the end of a long day the idea suddenly made sense to him I was sitting with Jack and I said Oh I do see how this could really come together to make something really compelling Glass said It all fit together for me In February Glass and Dorsey gathered the odeo staff and presented the idea of designing a Short Message Service SMS system that allowed people to send a text update to one number 40404 that would be simultaneously broadcast to all their friends Glass had come up with a name for it as well Twttr in the same abbreviated style as the photo sharing website Flickr He and Dorsey wanted a name that would represent the physical feeling of receiving THE ST ORY OF Tw TT ER

The Story of Twitter — page 6 — A Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey attended New York University but left before earning a degree T WITTER

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