Steve Parks

Twitter and the Evolution of a Business Idea

The images above trace the history of Twitter, the hugely successful (in terms of fame rather than profit at this stage) micro-blogging service.

I first heard about Twitter in early 2007, and opened an account (managing to get my name without any additional numbers etc at that stage!) - but never really got around to exploring it further.

As part of the upgrade to this blog I decided it'd be good to also be able to post regular, small updates - without cluttering up the main blog. So I decided to figure out how to Tweet, and you can now see my Tweets in the right hand sidebar of this blog.

In doing that I became interested, as always, in the genesis of the business behind the service - and here is the story...

The Idea

Everything starts with one person and their idea. In this case the person was Jack Dorsey [PHOTO 1], otherwise known as @jack to Twitter folk.

Here's how he describes coming up with the original idea:

On May 31st, 2000, I signed up with a new service called LiveJournal. I was user 4,136 which entitled me a permanent account and street cred in some alternate geeky universe which I have not yet visited. I was living in the Sunshine Biscuit Factory in Oakland California and starting a company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the web.

One night in July of that year I had an idea to make a more "live" LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it. For the next 5 years, I thought about this concept and tried to silently introduce it into my various projects. It slipped into my dispatch work. It slipped into my networks of medical devices. It slipped into an idea for a frictionless service market. It was everywhere I looked: a wonderful abstraction which was easy to implement and understand.

The Sketch

Jack likes doodling on yellow legal pads, and that's where Twitter first emerged from his head [PHOTO 2].

At this stage his name for the site was 'stat.us' using the '.us' domain suffix instead of '.com' because he thought that was cool! The evolution of the brand name is one of the interesting things about Twitter - morphing through a number of versions, just like the design of teh site itself and the feature set.

But Twitter today isn't that different from his original sketch.

The Detail

Jack worked for a company called Odeo (now called Obvious after it sold the website called Odeo.com). The company was run by Evan Williams, who is a great entrepreneur and may merit his own blog post sometime.
His masterstroke was creating a company that encouraged doodling, pet projects and trying out new ideas, even if it wasn't 'on focus'.

Jack toyed with the Twitter idea some more, and wrote out the list in [PHOTO 3] in early 2006. It's not very clear in the photo, so here's what it says:

casual awareness.
"what are you up to?"

multiple entry point to set status
- web
- email
- phone
- sms
- im

multiple ways to "subscribe" to status
- web
- email
- phone
- sms
- im

3 aspects
- set status
- timeline (collaborative)
- configuration

In a very simple list Jack set out what is still recognisable as the way Twitter works. It doesn't take a 50 page proposal. So far we've seen two sparsely covered pages of legal paper - and we get the idea.

Jack wrote at this time:

The 6th year; the idea has finally solidified (thanks to the massively creative environment my employer Odeo provides) and taken a novel form. We're calling it twttr. It's evolved a lot in the past few months. From an excited discussion and persuasion on the South Park playground to a recently approved application for a SMS shortcode. I'm happy this idea has taken root; I hope it thrives. Some things are worth the wait.

The Prototype

Jack had persuaded Evan to give him the chance to create a prototype of the site, and with help from colleague Biz Stone they created what you see in [PHOTO 4]. It's very basic, but it does the job, allowing teh concept to be tested. In a future blog I want to write a little bit about 'Agile Development', but one of the key concepts is to test the idea as quickly as possible in the simplest way possible. This is what Twitter did.

The Launch

This user interface then evolved into [PHOTO 5] to gain a bit of design and colour (but it's still very basic) - and then into what you see in [PHOTO 6] which is my page on Twitter today.

You can see that it really is an evolution. They get it started as quickly as possible, and then constantly refine it. I really believe that is the best way to go.

But it's rare for entrepreneurs to let the actual brand name evolve, but I think they were right to do so. Talking further about this, Jack says in a recent interview with the LA Times:

The working name was just "Status" for a while. It actually didn

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