How I think Twitter grew out of Odeo.
This is totally an opinion. I want everyone reading to understand that. Everything I say here could be totally 100% wrong. (It could be 100% correct as well.. but I happen to think that is far less likely than the 100% wrong option.)
I got the following @reply in response to this blog.
andycaster @neilgorman your little project is EXACTLY what, I think, Twitter was REALLY designed for... not as a messaging system... looks great! 11:11 AM August 25, 2008 from web in reply to neilgorman
This got me thinking, about how the people who started Twitter and the reasons why they might have started it. Shortly after that I spoke with Scott Samuel (@onlyloveisreal) about this same thing. Here is a summery of what I believe Twitter came to be.
1. First there was a company called Obviously and it made Odeo. The people at Obviously did not want to do only one thing as evidenced by the following quote from the official Obviously blog.
As I've mentioned before, the plan for Obvious is to build a series of products, which hopefully gain from being part of the greater whole. I also said, "When justified by growth, resource needs, and desire of the team, we will spin off growing properties to form their own entities...."
So I assume that Obviously was a company that encouraged people to be creative, and work on cool projects that might grow into something.
2. In the valley a new company like Obviously must would not be contained to a office. People who worked there would need to go out and do meetings with VC people, other industry hot shots, etc. Because not everyone was always in the office the people at Obviously needed a way to keep in contact with each other, and I'm guessing that someone (I'm guessing Jack Dorsey... but I'm not sure about that) threw together some code that would allow people to send a text message to one place, then have that same text message aggregate to other people.
i.e. Twitter (maybe) was invented as an internal communication tool.
3. After using Twitter the people at Obviously got that "Oh my God" sort of feeling. They knew that had found that killer web app that was very simple, maybe even elegant, and useful.
4. Twitter gets turned into a product. It started slow but then grew and grew AND GREW.
When we started Obvious in October of last year, we had a good feeling about Twitter. However, it had been launched publicly three months before and was only growing slowly. I wouldn't have guessed that by March it would be consuming all our resources (our weekends, our servers...).
5. The Odeo thing was not going as well as expected, again as evienced from the following on the Obviously blog...
In the last few months, we here at Obvious have been increasingly focused on Twitter. As a result, our original product, Odeo, has not gotten the attention it deserves.
It does not cost us much to run—in fact, AdSense covers the hosting—but on the web you need to constantly improve, or fade away. We've put too much into Odeo to want to see it fade away. And it still has tons of potential. But we're not improving it fast enough.
The post goes on to talk about how Obviously was looking for a buyer that wanted Odeo so that they could focus more on Twitter.
6. They did find a buyer, and then...
The time has come for Twitter to make that leap. We're happy to announce that Twitter is graduating from the home of Obvious and becoming its own company—appropriately named, Twitter, Inc.
What does this mean? By some measures, it's just a legal technicality. Because we haven't had time to devote to anything else, Twitter is the only thing Obvious does (except for some occasional maintenance on Odeo, which will continue until we transfer it to its new owner). And all the people who work for Obvious will continue to work on Twitter (albeit, in different capacities in some cases).
The reason for the shift is because, as Twitter continues to grow, it will gain less from being under the Obvious umbrella and perhaps even push that umbrella until it flips inside out. Which doesn't make the umbrella happy, and just gets in Twitter's way. Perhaps I took the metaphor too far. The point is, we have big plans for Twitter, and it should stand on its own.
So then. Here we are... after all.
**UPDATE: I just found this, it is a interview with Biz Stone about Twitter.**
What is your personal story about how Twitter started?
Twitter started as a side project. Jack Dorsey had this simple idea inspired by the status messages in IM clients and he ran it by myself and Evan Williams. Ev suggested Jack and I take two weeks to build a prototype. Once we introduced the service to a few folks we knew we had something.
I thought about totally changing the post after I found this (goes to show you, google before blogging) but I thought the theory I posted was kind of cool... so I just did this update sort of thing here at the end. Hope no one minds.
**END UPDATE**
-N
