Creation of Twitter
from Papi TV.com 6/11 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz 4/14
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, who was recently a guest speaker at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, told the audience about his obsession with city life (ie, the infrastructure of the city of New York with the population of 8 million people). Dorsey became a computer programmer to be able to draw the maps of the city. “I drew dots, then connected them – exciting” he admitted. There were streets where buses, taxis & trucks were driving in certain directions at certain times. Then he understood that there was a “missing link”. The link was people that live and work in the city.
Predecessor to Twitter. Dorsey first conceived of the idea for a Web-based Short Message communication service while he was attending NYU, inspired by the brief messages exchanged by New York Taxicabs. He built a simple program that allowed sending short messages to his friends from his first Blackberry phone in real time. “I quickly found out that none of my friends were really interested in my messages and their devices were too slow to get it on time – described Dorsey. Meanwhile more & more people started to use short messages.
Creating Twitter. In 2006 Dorsey, and his partners – Williams & Stone – created a program and tested it on 17 co-workers. It took them two weeks to do get it working the way he wanted. “I noticed immediately that there was some value in it” – admitted Dorsey – “people like to inter-act with each other”. We all see things from different perspective. Twitter gives a chance to – not only to present our points of view – but also to interact with others. Not just this. Twitter also changes speculations to facts. How? Here’s an example. San Francisco is a seismic area and when people hear the fire truck, they think that an earthquake has happened. They start to speculate how strong it was and where it happened. Twitter changes speculations to facts and it happens in minutes.
Social networks are nothing new. People always want to know what going on around them and use any possible devices that are available. Dorsey admitted with a smile that he tweets to his mom every day what he had for breakfast. “I know that no one cares about it except my mom” – he said. The most important thing is that we can carry the entire world around in our pocket. Twitter uses the technology that makes it faster & global. We can twit not only using the smart phones but also cheap phones in the middle of Kenya. Dorsey asked the audience of Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. “Do you know that 60% of the population of Bagdad has access to Text messages? They can send and receive them with no charge. It means that they can tweet just like us in the United States”. Twitter is not only about music or celebrities. It is about everything and about us.
Twitter was founded in 2006 and currently has an estimated 200 million users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day. The service has an international force, with 2/3 of its traffic coming from outside the U.S. Twitter played an instrumental role in a series of Middle Eastern uprisings, most notably Iran’s in 2009 and Egypt’s in 2011. The world knew what happened in these countries in a minute.
Another Square Idea. Jack Dorsey is now making waves with his one inch by one inch device called Square. “Payment is another form of communication” – he said. (see our Posts about “Square” in Wiz4biz Blog)
Comments: What do you think? Is Dorsey a Visionary like Steve Jobs?