Twitter co-founder Biz Stone took some time to blog today a bit about his past. He goes back to Xanga, then Blogger/Google, then (though not directly mentioned) Odeo. He talks about how after they failed to sell Odeo, Evan Williams created Obvious, a parent company with the purpose of buying back Odeo from its investors. Around this time, Jason Goldman, another previous Blogger/Google guy, joined them. Among the assets of Odeo was a little side project created during a hackathon, called Twitter. The rest really is history.
But Twitter didn’t catch fire immediately. Instead, as it slowly began to grow within Obvious, Stone, Williams, and Twitter creator Jack Dorsey decided to spin it off as its own company, Twitter, Inc. And as all of them, including Goldman, began to spend more time on Twitter, Obvious faded into the background. Until now.
After his reminiscing, Stone announces at the bottom of his post that he’s going to be taking a step back from Twitter to re-team with Williams and Goldman (both of whom recently left their full-time duties at Twitter) to re-start The Obvious Corporation. → Read More
Dick Costolo just wrapped up his keynote at All Things D. It wasn’t livestreamed, so for those of you who missed out, there were some interesting tidbits about user numbers, defense of Twitter’s stewardship of its developer community and some hints about the ad business.
Rather than any newsy bombshells, my biggest takeaway was what I’ve written before about Twitter’s third CEO in its short corporate life. Costolo brings much needed operational rigor, business focus, and methodical process to a chaotic, culturally-transformative company that could have fallen into a MySpace-like trap of celebrity cache, runaway spam and buzz that outstripped business potential. But it’s come at the cost of sheer product visionary that both Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams had in spades, and Twitter is still waiting for that visionary to fill the void. → Read More
This is the post I haven’t wanted to write for weeks. This is the post no one wants to write. No one wants to say Twitter is in trouble. That’s like shooting your best friend’s dog.
But I’m increasingly convinced that Twitter is operationally in trouble, for a lot of the same reasons that Fortune’s Jessi Hempel outlines in her cover today, and other reasons I’ve been hearing about for months. → Read More
Today’s return of Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey to the company he created to once again head up its product efforts raises the question of what will co-founder Evan Williams be doing now. When he handed over the CEO reigns to Dick Costolo last October, the company said he was going to focus more on the product side of things. Dorsey is now the head of product and the two co-founders have a contentious relationship. (Early investor Fred Wilson describes the relationship like that of John Lennon and Paul McCartney of the Beatles: “They made great music together for a while, but then they both kind of got ambitious about things and didn’t see eye to eye anymore.”)
It’s an open secret in tech circles that Williams is not spending that much time at Twitter anymore. His absence has been been noted in various news reports, but it’s usually stated as rumor or from unattributed sources. Well, it’s true and it’s official. Today, I asked Twitter about Ev’s current role in light of Dorsey’s taking over the product lead. A company spokesperson sent me the following statement: → Read More
So there I was flying back to San Francisco after the Holidays, flipping through the United Hemispheres magazine to better understand my awesome Snack Box options, when I was stopped by an animated drawing of Twitter founder Evan Williams and an accompanying Q&A for joe-plane-traveler about the popular site.
The interview starts with a throw-away clause saying Williams is credited with inventing blogging, which is weird because I have never even heard Williams claim this. (Perhaps they meant inventing Blogger?) More to the point, the Q&A ends with Williams saying this in response to all those concerns about business model: “There aren’t many things on the Internet or anywhere else that I can think of that have died of popularity.”
Williams is right. But plenty of things have died in spite of popularity. → Read More
I’m not talking about the privacy of Twitter’s millions of users- who they follow, what they retweet and the inner-sanctum of their DMs. I’m talking about the privacy of Evan Williams– one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the Web 2.0 era, yet one who doesn’t have Gawker photographers come to his house, doesn’t have snarky movies made about him and doesn’t have many hit pieces written about him either.
The closest Williams came to scandal and privacy invasion was when TechCrunch published some of his hacked emails, and much of the world just sympathized with Williams rather than piling on. Williams can be as quiet, shy and awkward as any Valley wunderkind, but somehow he’s never called snobby or aloof. He’s generally regarded as the nice guy in Silicon Valley.
The backlash against popular, iconic founders seems inevitable in the age of blogging and social media and it doesn’t take a degree in sociology to figure out that a lot of that has to do with jealousy– whether its over Kevin Rose’s charisma or Mark Zuckerberg’s billions. So how has Williams eluded this? He’s managed to keep himself from becoming iconic despite co-founding, funding and running one of the most iconic social media sites in the world. → Read More
Maybe it is a good thing that Twitter co-founder Evan Williams is no longer CEO — he now seems to have time to do things like answer a boatload of questions from users on Twitter. For about an hour today, Williams did just that and provided some interesting insights into New Twitter and what types of possibilities are out there for the service in the future, feature-wise.
I went ahead and curated a list of his best tweet replies, but I’ll spell the answers out in a simplified manner below. According to Williams: → Read More
As you may have heard by now, Twitter has a new CEO. Former COO Dick Costolo is taking over from Evan Williams as the head of the company. A few minutes ago, I got a chance to speak to both of them about the change.
“New Twitter was definitely a trigger for this,” Williams told me. “Conveniently, I took over the CEO role just about two years ago — and brought Dick in just about a year ago. I’ve always thought of myself as more of a product guy, and New Twitter seems to work out well,” he continued. “New Twitter was a moment of clarity for all of us here,” Costolo added. “[With this change] Ev can once again focus on product.” → Read More
“First full day as Twitter COO tomorrow. Task #1: undermine CEO, consolidate power.”
That was Dick Costolo on September 13, 2009.
Today, just over one year later, Costolo has done it. Someone roll out the Mission Accomplished banner! → Read More
Twitter COO Dick Costolo has just taken over as CEO of Twitter from current CEO and co-founder Evan Williams, Twitter confirmed today.
In a post on the matter, Williams writes the following: → Read More
Later today, Twitter CEO Evan Williams will be interviewed by Umair Haque of the Havas Media Lab at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. We’ll of course be covering any announcements that will be made by Williams on stage, but we expect that at least part of the keynote address will be centered around the company’s advertising platform.
Twitter made a memorable splash at SXSW three years ago, and will likely have opted for the conference as the right place to detail its digital advertising plans, which it hopes will become a major source of revenue in addition to its realtime search outsourcing deals with major Internet players. → Read More
Every year the World Economic Forum names its Young Global Leaders, a list of up-and-comers from the worlds of business, politics, culture, and non-profits. Last year’s list included YouTube founder Chad Hurley, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Digg founder Kevin Rose, and Skype CEO Josh Silverman.
Today, the World Economic Forum named its 2010 Young Global Leaders. There are 197 people on the list overall, including celebrities like musician Wyclef Jean and fashion designer Stella McCartney. Some of the startup CEOs and tech execs on this year’s least include: → Read More
We got a tip about a video from the same people who made us – and subsequently, you – aware of Biz Stone‘s 2006 video-recorded attempt to explain ‘Twttr’ when the service that became Twitter was still in diapers.
This time, it’s Twitter’s other co-founder, Evan Williams, who appears in a video with developer Paul Bausch, Meg Hourihan, Alberto González and some birds, recorded way back when. → Read More
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams is on the Web video show Tekzilla in an interview conducted by Veronica Belmont on-stage last week at the Web 2.0 Expo. It was the same day that Biz Stone was in New York taping the Colbert Report. The best part of the interview is when Ev starts answering questions from the audience submitted via Twitter, which is where the clip starts above (you can watch the entire segment here).
The first question is what advice would he give to someone trying to build their own startup. His answer: → Read More
Germany’s Der Spiegel published an interview with Twitter CEO Evan Williams yesterday on its website, and Williams had a couple of interesting things to say. You can find a poorly Google-translated version of the interview here, which features Williams answering the usual, boring questions ‘professional’ journalists tend to ask about the micro-sharing service (the reporter opened the interview with the Pulitzer-prize caliber question “so does Twitter spark narcissism and idiocy?”).
But Williams did share something worth noting at the end of the interview.
When asked about possible future features for Twitter, he reportedly said that one of the things being considered is an extension that lets people know what’s happening in their immediate vicinity. That would basically mean that Twitter could actively ping users about local events that are going on in their neighborhood, in real-time, based on the location they’ve indicated. → Read More
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams was on Charlie Rose last Friday. In the clip after the jump, he predicts that Twitter will be something “that normal people do” within five years. He compares Twitter to the early days of blogging (another topic he knows something about, having been the founder of what became Blogger). When blogging started, most people didn’t get it and it seemed like a huge waste of time that only appealed to narcissists. Twitter gets a lot of the same criticisms, yet somehow more and more people find it a valuable mode of communication.
Hopefully, it won’t take five years for Twitter to seem normal. → Read More
