Twitter was an idea? The original "stat.us" idea was something like "Social SMS, to broadcast to your friends what you're up to as you go about your day." Jack Dorsey admitted that they had zero clue that Twitter would arrive where it has.
I don't believe ideas are inherently good or bad. A lot also depends on timing and execution. Twitter turned out to be a great idea, but I don't think there are many people who could have pulled it off the way Jack Dorsey and his cohorts did.
> comparisons to fb might not be completely accurate since one of the founders, apparently had the idea for twitter when folks were updating their IM clients.
I had the idea for twitter back in 1998, but I didn't do anything with it, neither did the founder of facebook... Ideas mean nothing without execution.
>Isn't this the original concept of Twitter? Microblogging,
Fyi based on books about Twitter history... Jack Dorsey's original concept of Twitter was inspired by AOL AIM status messages and not blogging.
>Microblogging, where Twitter acts as the index/"spine" of your blog, and external sites act as the meat on the bones?
Arguably, another Twitter founder Ev Williams (who started Bloggr, Medium) was more into "thoughtful texts" and wanted Twitter to support that. However, when Twitter was a big hit at the 2007 Austin SWSX, it was the "silly" status messages that made Twitter viral.
Twitter was obviously a great idea, but it wasn't an obviously great idea.
Just because no one (including the Twitter guys) could see the direction it would grow in doesn't mean that it wasn't a great place to start. In retrospect, clearly it was.
1. Draw out your idea. The sentiment here seems to be more about getting the idea out of your head than planning how to implement it; that putting the idea on paper transforms it. It also lets you share it more easily.
2. Recognize luck. Dorsey discussed how certain factors come together to encourage building an idea. The idea for Twitter was several years old, but in 2005 cross carrier SMS made it easier to realize. Also his working situation (@Odio with Evan Williams and Biz Stone) allowed exploration of other things. Ev and Biz immediately understood the concept due to their blogging background.
3. Iterate. Dorsey talked about how the @, RT:, and # paradigms were user-driven, and the Twitter founders thought it was ugly and resisted it initially. Talked about Square and the need to iterate on the designed to make it polished enough for people to trust.
4. Know when to stop. Sometimes ideas just won't work, and you need to put them aside, knowing that some element of the idea might resurface later. I thought it was interesting that he couched it this way, as it is more palatable than the thought of killing an idea entirely.
> Twitter was an extrapolation, Google was an extrapolation as well.
Were they?
Twitter: "an absolutely minimal MySpace clone. Let users write posts to feed using SMS."
Google: "Like AltaVista, but without all the bullshit - just the search box. For weighting, have it use this funny algorithm we figured out the other day."
I'm not denying both were innovative - I just think the innovation, the "extrapolation", didn't happen at the technical/tactical level we're discussing here. All the pieces were already there, and used for similar things. The innovation was in figuring out that this particular shape of service is something people might want to use, and that it could make money.
The difference is Steve Jobs spent 10 years working on NeXT, developing a clearer vision of the PC and creating what became OSX. Jack Dorsey spent 5 years doing POS systems and credit card processing deals at Square. Twitter isn't lacking for a "Twitter Pay" feature.
Dorsey's original idea for Twttr was a service that let you group SMS what club you're at to your friends list. If he had been on his own it probably would have been yet another group texting app (maybe eventually WhatsApp). It was Evan Williams (IMHO), with his Blogger experience, that developed Twitter into the "micro blogging" service we came to know. Evan Williams is working on Medium now, another idea broadcasting platform.
They completely missed the point of Twitter, but you have to give them credit for making history. Nobody has ever posted to Twitter using a brain before. This could change everything.
I think it probably would have. Twitter was originally started as a side incubator project within Odeo.com (it became obvious corp). Three guys, @noah, @jack, and @csshsh (florian) were working on it day and night. They basically lived at the office, focused on getting something working quickly, had a good set of ideas and some examples of how it could work. From initial idea to working prototype was just a few days. They even had a business model, which was thrown out, to make money via sms from the carriers. Later as it grew, not having a business model and focusing on the platform, tools, scaling, and community made more sense.
2) I find the quality of writing in this article really amusing. Siegler's just repeating everything that Dorsey says. Posting screenies of Dorsey's tweets and removing all text would say the exact same thing.
I thought I was so clever and was going to reply "you've invented Twitter!" and then I read the rest of your comment, and realized that was your point. Damn it.
Nobody cares about Twitter-the-idea, and that's never what anyone means any more when they use the term. What everyone loves is Twitter-the-platform, which is a huge success.
> This idea will also fail; you can't tell people how to use a service.
Yes, you can. When the site is small, you can manually moderate all submissions, literally telling people how they may use it. After the site grows, the "base" will continue to obey the site's culture. As long as the base has more power (in some metric or another) the site will continue in that direction without further work. (This is basically how HN has been set up.)
Note that this might keep the site small—like HN, and unlike Twitter. But that's still entirely monetizable, especially if you have a much larger viewing population than submitting population.
On the Twitter point, the idea of Twitter was to enable groups to text message each other. It was a very obvious idea because texting groups was awful on dumbphones and people wanted to do it. What Twitter became was something that wasn't really foreseen, but is a textbook exercise in pivoting as you see what your users are doing.
And as such, that's essentially how ideas solve problems. Very rarely does someone see a problem and come up with a perfect solution first time - an entrepreneur sees how their solution changes the problem space, and pivots with their users needs until the solution fits. And then you have this amazing product that apparently solves something that isn't a "problem" - because the product has changed to eliminate the original problem and enable the user to do something useful.
The first post on my twitter account was "what is this and why would anyone want to use it?"
It was definitely not "this is precisely the thing that I had been hoping for 10 years somebody would code up."
If you had tried to estimate the number of potential twitter users by counting up the number of people in the world who were search for a service that would publish their SMS-length plain text messages on a web site, you would have gotten nowhere meaningful.
Twitter was an idea? The original "stat.us" idea was something like "Social SMS, to broadcast to your friends what you're up to as you go about your day." Jack Dorsey admitted that they had zero clue that Twitter would arrive where it has.
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