Biz Stone tells Twitter Story at EBE07

[Twitter's Biz Stone at Evento Blog Espana. Photo by Shel]

One of the real high points of EBE 07, was meeting and spending time with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone & his wife Livia.  It turns our we both have a few things in common.  We both attended Northeastern University in Boston and now we both live in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Also we both think Twitter is an amazingly useful phenomenon. Of course, he has more at stake in that than I do.

Biz was relaxed onstage.  He told his story in the same relaxed manner that he told me stries at the bar the day earlier. He talked about inauspiciously starting his career stacking books for the staid Boston publisher Little Brown & Co, who still designed book jackets by hand.  One day, Biz designed a jacket on a PC, printed it out and slipped in into a stack headed to the creative department for review. He got discovered and was promoted to be a book jack designer.

Eventually he co-founded a software company in Boston.  It struggle to find a collaborative way to communicate software and discovered Blogger, the pioneering software from a startup named Pyra, which had been co-founded by Evan Williams and eventually acquired by Google.

Evan and Biz became online friends.  Eventually, Evan would invite Biz to join the Google Blogger team.  But then Evan would depart to start Odeo, a venture backed podcast company. Biz eventually followed. Both were fond of SMS and Twitter was started as a little hack for the Odeo team to use for communications.

The Odeo team loved the simple little program.  It helped them understand and share the little things going on in the office--who was in a  good or bad mood, who needed help with a problem, etc.

One weekend, Biz and most of the Odeo team were slaving at the office as is commonplace in startups.  But not  Evan.  He was enjoying wine tasting in Napa Valley & he Tweeted the team  a report of himself enjoying wine & sunshine. It cracked the team up, all at once as they read the little Twitter blast. It was different from hearing about it as a Monday morning review, because they learned about it as it happened and while they were still slaving while Evan was playing.

That everyday type of incident was what transformed the Odeo podcast team into the Twitter microblog team. They returned the money that VCs had invested into Odeo and the startup team restarted in a new direction.

Twitter doesn't give out a lot of numbers.  I had asked Biz earlier if Valley rumors that the company had 10 million users was accurate and he declined to tell me. He said that Twitter's success measurement was the number of messages, not the # of users.  He repeated this onstage, but never did serve up any numbers on the subject. There is little doubt that Twitter is the world's most popular microblogging tool, no matter how you measure it.

When I spoke the previous day, I received all of three questions from attendees. Biz must have received 30. The reason: attendees could Tweet them to the moderator who was interviewing Biz. It was a good display of Twitter's efficacy as a communications tool.

Biz had also talked about Twitter's amazing abilities to provide 140-character bulletins of fast-breaking news, using a recent San Francisco earthquake as an example. I was at a blogging dinner for Hugh MacLeod when that occurred. I earned of the quake when my wife called me. Withing minutes, we in the room, who never felt the quake were spreading a word through RTwter as were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Tweeters in the Bay Area.

The topical news was moving across the screen of mobile devices so fast you could not read it. My iPhone was working so hard, it bacame a little hot in the hand.  I pictured clouds of smoke coming out of it.

45 minutes later, SFGate, the official site of the ailing San Francisco Chronicle reported on the quake.  As far as I could tell, that was the first quake news report through an officil channel and it was more detailed than what w had learned on Twitter.  But by then, those of us using Twitter, knew most of the facts we needed and so did our friends all over the world.  In fact, the incident marks the largest and most collaborative US-based example of Citizen Journalism that I know and it happened because of this simple little SMS program.

I have only recently met both Biz and Mark.  They both impress me. I am relieved that I have both heard that advertising is unlikely to e part of their business model--once they have a business model.  They both talk of their abundance of choices for revenue.  This scares me just a little bit.

While Biz insists that they will cross the revenue bridge was they are certain of the reliability and feature sets of the product, my experience with startups has shown me that lack of focus has been the cause of death in too many promising youg companies. I hope this sharp and vauable team chooses a course and sticks with it sooner, rather than later.

Comments

[Stuart Henshall]

Shel,
I've been looking at a number of twitter search engines recently. I think the majority are just importing public RSS and making it searchable. Thus, you would expect they would have a reasonable sense of "recent-users". I've seen really low numbers like 525,000, now that would not cover private accounts etc. Frankly it is foolish for them to be secretive. One of the things that grew Skype was the numbers and visibility. It's no longer growing... so...fast. Twitter should be releasing the data. They have a successful niche already.

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[Kami Huyse]

I am worried about these business models. A comnpany HAS to make money to stay in business, but the stuff that Facebook has pulled lately has me worried about Twitter too.