Add to iTunesBiz Stone - Co-Founder Twitter
Summary
In this episode, I sit down with Biz Stone the Co-Founder of Twitter. We talk about his background and how they came up with the idea of Twitter. We also touch on the importance of Open APIs to Twitter’s growth.
Links from Interview
Interview Transcript
Interview begins at 0:41
| 00:41 | Sean Ammirati: To start out, could you just give us a little of your background – what you did before you got to Twitter?Biz Stone: Sure. How far do you want me to go back?Sean Ammirati: Just whatever you think is relevant but maybe the last couple of companies you’ve been at or whatever. |
| 01:08 | Biz Stone: Sure. Before working at Twitter, I was at a company called Obvious, which was a company that was formed when we acquired Odeo and Twitter, because Twitter was sort of a side project at Odeo. Before that, I was at Odeo which is a podcasting company, and I had left Google to join Odeo.At Google, I was working on Blogger because I had previously helped start a company called Xanga.com which was a social journaling/web blogging community site. So, I came from the blogging world; like a side step into the podcasting business for a little while, and then from that, worked on Twitter with Jack Dorsey. We recently – in April – spawned Twitter out into its own company. |
| 01:59 | Sean Ammirati: So you weren’t part of starting Blogger? But then, that sort of came together. I guess the third person is Evan Williams in terms of the founders. Is that correct?Biz Stone: That’s right. I was not part of the original Blogger team. I was invited to join the Blogger team once they were acquired by Google. So I went to work at Google technically, not Blogger.Sean Ammirati: Cool, that’s helpful. Obviously, this service has gained popularity pretty rapidly. I’d like to talk a little bit about that in the interview. But for those who aren’t familiar with Twitter, can you give a quick overview of how it works? |
| 02:39 | Biz Stone: Sure. It’s basically a really simple service. We ask one question, and that question is: “What are you doing?” And people can answer that question but they have to answer it in less than a hundred and forty characters because they can answer the question either on the web or from mobile texting or SMS or from an instant message like AIM or Jabber.They answer this question, and when they do that, the question is then routed out to their followers which are basically people who are friends of theirs or subscribe to their answers to these questions. The answers are routed out to whatever devices their followers are using. So in essence, what we have is a sort of a device-agnostic message routing system that takes these messages from a variety of sources and then spits them back out again to whatever the preference is of the folks who are following it. |
| 02:45 | Sean Ammirati: Yeah, cool. How did you guys come up with this idea?Biz Stone: Well basically, Jack Dorsey had been kind of sitting on this idea for years, it turns out. He’s been kind of flipping it over in the back of his head no matter where he worked. He had always been kind of fascinated with routing and this sort of thing.We were working together at Odeo, and for some reason, Jack and I became friends and we were talking. A few of us were thinking about what are some interesting ways that maybe we can merge SMS to the web. At that time, Jack finally decided, “You know what, I was gonna tell these guys about this idea that has been sort of haunting me all these many long years.” |
| 03:20 | He had come up with this idea where if you just look at only the status field of an instant message application like AIM, and you just look at that as a sort of really small version of what people are already doing like LiveJournal and you just make it super simple, “Here’s what I’m doing.” But, it’s essentially the same idea as connecting with your friends on LiveJournal, just way shorter.So he had mentioned this idea. And then around that same time, I think about the aftermath of mobile texting, he said, “Hey man, we should mash these things together and create a little bit of a prototype.” So that’s when we kind of went off in a corner and we worked for two weeks and we created a prototype. We showed the rest of the team and everyone just sort of giggled. They all kind of loved it. It was really fun. We used it over the weekend. We found it very compelling and we decided that we would keep working on it. |
| 05:07 | Sean Ammirati: Interesting. At what time did you guys officially start working on this then?Biz Stone: Well, we unofficially started working on Twitter as just sort of a prototype in March of 2006.Sean Ammirati: OK.Biz Stone: We went along for a few months. There’s a lot of a learning process here because we come from the Web, and Twitter is very much not a Web service. It has a web component to it, certainly, but it’s a mobile service and it’s a platform. So, we had to learn a lot about short codes in the mobile industry.So, we built this prototype very quickly. But then we got into the world of short codes and the mobile industry, so we were working along. So, I would say it wasn’t until about August of 2006 that people started using Twitter because it was just sort of a friends-and-family thing. But after Blogger linked to what we have on the Web, suddenly people started using it. |
| 06:16 | Sean Ammirati: Got it. So, that was in August, and I was at South by Southwest. I was unaware of it going in. It seemed like that was a fairly critical inflection point for you. Is that true? What are the points as you look over the last year and a half that you would attribute to being critical inflection points for growth of the service?Biz Stone: Yeah, I think South by Southwest certainly was. It was kind of like a perfect storm going on at that point because we had started to accumulate some first-mover technology, geeky-type folks who were drawn to the service because of its simplicity and its extendability. So we had some of those folks already on it. Of course, those are the folks that go to South by Southwest, so they were able to, you know, tell other people about it.We also won a South by Southwest Web Award so we got a little bit of, like, press and everything. This all kind of happened at the same time, and to add to that, Twitter is really very convenient and it really works well in kind of a conference/party atmosphere. So, all of the things together made Twitter the toast of South by Southwest because every year at South by Southwest, there’s always some new fun thing. |
| 07:28 | It becomes, like, the thing to talk about. So, we just kind of lucked out, and at that year, people decided that it’s going to be Twitter that they were going to talk about. So, that was definitely a big moment for us.The other big moment for us was when we decided to add multiple devices to Twitter such as instant messaging. That allowed for a lot more people to be able to use it in a way that they felt comfortable using it. We still were very enamored with the idea of SMS and we want to grow that globally because we think that there’s a lot of potential there. But we’re also very keen on remaining and keeping along these lines of device-agnosticity and allowing things like instant messaging, Web, and other ways in and out of Twitter. |
| 08:16 | Sean Ammirati: That’s very interesting. Kind of taking a slight twist off of that, you mentioned that a couple of times you referred to Twitter as an open platform. I’m curious how much you think that’s been a critical attribute to your success. Just the fact that kind of anybody can come up and interact with the web services. I use it through an app called Twitterrific which I don’t think is even your application.Biz Stone: Did you say Twitterrific?Sean Ammirati: Yeah. |
| 08:48 | Biz Stone: Yeah. The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we’ve done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas, and build things like Twitterrific, which is just a beautiful elegant way to use Twitter that we wouldn’t have been able to get to, being a very small team.So, the API which has easily 10 times more traffic than the website, has been really very important to us. We’ve seen some amazing work built on top of it from tiny little mobile applications like an SMS timer that just allows you to set a reminder over SMS to call your mom or something like that, to more elaborate visual recreations of Twitter like twittervision.com which shows an animated map of the world and what everyone’s doing around the world with Twitter. Twitter is popping up from Spain and Japan and United States.And that’s very, sort of like, “Look at that!” It’s like staring at a fish bowl or something – an aquarium. You just find yourself getting lost in it. The API has really been a big success for us, and it’s something that we want to continue to focus our efforts on, looking forward. |
| 09:17 | Sean Ammirati: Cool. One of the things that’s interesting — and I think I know what your answer here is going to be – but I feel compelled to ask anyway. With this sort of open API being such a critical part of your success, how does that affect the business model as that develops?Biz Stone: Well, it depends on what business model we decide to pursue. We’re still very much weighing our options there, but there are definitely leading contender business models that we have mapped out where the API plays a significant role in generating just more traffic to our system. It puts us in an enviable position.So, the API becomes not only crucial for us on a creativity level and something that we can offer to the developers so that they can build their own applications and experiences, but it also becomes a way for us to grow and a way for us to potentially - depending on what business model we choose - do well there, business-wise. No matter what, we’re going to be considering the API. We’re going to be considering what folks are doing with it going forward so that it becomes part of what we are and what we do. |
| 11:41 | Sean Ammirati: Are you guys talking publicly about what these leading contenders at this point?Biz Stone: No. We haven’t really shared the research that we’ve been doing business model-wise. We’ve been keeping that to ourselves because we really want to focus on creating compelling user experiences. There’s a lot of stuff just with the user experience and the website and the SMS workflow that we’re just amazed that people are even able to use Twitter.We’ve been looking at some of these things that we have. As we’ve grown, we’ve kind of rolled with it. In some of areas of Twitter, we just made it nearly impossible for people to sign up. We only recently introduced CAPTCHA that is accessible and it allows visually impaired people to join Twitter. So, that was sort of an embarrassing thing that we took too long to do.So, we’re holding back on the business model. We leave the business model until we feel comfortable that we have a compelling user experience and that there’s value there for people. So, we need to focus on that first. |
| 12:43 | Sean Ammirati: So, you guys just closed a venture round, right?Biz Stone: That’s right.Sean Ammirati: Any time table in terms of when you think you’ll need to go public with the business model?Biz Stone: Well, going publicly — there are two ways you can look at that. In many ways, we’re already moving forward with our business model. We just haven’t announced to everyone exactly how it works and what it is. Certainly, the timeline has already been sort of activated.With regards to, “Here’s how we do everything,” we may never completely explain how everything works. But we’ll certainly share this information when we have a good grasp on exactly how it’s going to work with people. We’ve even done experiments; some sponsorship type experiments that we’re going to be releasing soon, so people will be able to see what kind of things we’re working on. |
| 13:45 | Sean Ammirati: Interesting. You recently just added a couple of new features, right? Some search functionality.Biz Stone: Yeah. We originally had search in there way back in the day, and it was just kind of thrown in and it wasn’t scalable. So we had to take that down and retool it. And we recently launched the ability for people to just search and see if, in fact, their friends are already on Twitter, which amazingly wasn’t in there for a really long time.So, you could be on Twitter and even though it was really compelling when you use it with your friends, you didn’t even know that there’s twelve of your really close friends on there, not if you ask them personally. So, we launched that recently. Yeah.We also launched the ability to find out who from your Gmail address book is already on Twitter. That’s pretty interesting, so let’s be there and be sort of pleasantly surprised how many people you already know are Twittering away and you could be following if you want to.Sean Ammirati: That launched last week. Is that right?Biz Stone: Yes. I think search and Gmail were launched pretty much around the same time. |
| 14:45 | Sean Ammirati: Interesting. Yeah, I think I saw that on Fred Wilson’s blog, which actually is another question I had for you. I think lots of people read his stuff and follow those guys. What’s it like working with the Union Square guys?Biz Stone: It’s great. We really like Fred a lot. When we were choosing who we’re going to go into business with regards to venture capital, Fred stood out because we have been reading his blog already. A lot of us here and it was really he got lots of things to say.Then when we met him, we just really liked him personally. Working with him was great because he’s very open and very hands on. He’s in New York but he comes out to board meetings, and he’s very acceptable and you could email anytime. He’s got a lot of great and smart things to say. So, we have nothing but good things to say about working with Fred and the folks at Union Square Ventures. |
| 15:45 | Sean Ammirati: Just to shift gears and we’re kind of close to wrapping up here. I did have just a couple of questions for you; more on the personal advice kind of thing for our listeners. Once you were part of the committee that Google acquired and now Obvious/Twitter; two of these startups, what are the things that if you were talking to aspiring entrepreneurs you would recommend like your lessons learned, your takeaways, that kind of thing? |
| 15:21 | Biz Stone: I think the biggest thing is kind of the most obvious thing. It’s like another reason why we kind of formed the word Obvious for that company. Something we learned when we were working with Odeo was that we weren’t as inspired as we should have been when we worked at Odeo. We weren’t really super into podcasting. I think that was a problem because at the event that we were working on something…where our passion is 100%. I think that ends up showing up in everything that you end up doing.So with Twitter, it was something that we created from scratch and we were super enthusiastic about it. We were using it. Like I said, we were literally giggling when we first started working. We just really enjoyed it and loved it. From that point, it translates to everything you do. It translates with management and it translates to coding.It translates to just sending out…I send out an email every couple of weeks or I try to, to the folks who have signed up on Twitter. And I love sending out email. I love sending “Here’s what we’ve been working on and here’s what’s new and stuff.” |
| 16:27 | So, I think, really the biggest thing is to ask yourself: Do I love this product? Do I personally want to use it everyday? Because that ends up just being what makes you want to wake up and run in to work and work on your stuff. It sounds sort of silly because it’s so obvious but I think a lot of people find themselves doing something for money or doing something because they think it’s a really good idea. They just don’t necessarily want to use it themselves. I think that’s a bad scenario to be in. |
| 17:55 | Sean Ammirati: Yes. That’s very good advice. What has been the biggest surprise running Twitter so far for you?Biz Stone: The biggest surprise. Let me think. One big surprise is obviously a pleasant sort of being big. There’s a number of people who took to it as we hope they would and used it in a way that we hoped. Actually, the biggest surprise really is the amazing amount of work; the creativity and work that’s gotten into projects with the API. We released that early on as part of Twitter thinking we should definitely have this because, why not? Why not open this up?The result has been 200 applications already using Twitter - many of them significant drivers of updates, and many of them just really beautiful innovative applications. I think really the amount of activity around the API has been the most surprising experience. |
| 19:08 | Sean Ammirati: Cool. So one last question which should be simple but just — I’ve always been curious. How did you guys come up with the name Twitter?Biz Stone: The same way lots of folks do. We put a whole bunch of names that are not going to happen on the list. We threw out a bunch of names. One way of doing it, like I said, we were working sort of prototype so it was really like two or three of us working along there. So we didn’t need it a lot in the sense that we wanted to move quickly. So we threw out a dozen names. |
| 19:38 | I was a huge fan of Twitter so I was really pushing for that because I liked the meaning that it evoked. The idea that birds twitter, birds make you go chirping, twitters. That’s sort of an insignificant little noise, and one Twitter message can be thought of as an insignificant little message.But on the whole, it’s about community. It’s about people communicating with one another in an aggregate form, so I thought that that word was kind of like the perfect little word. And it was a real word, and the users learned. So, it has sort of everything kind of going for it that would be a good product name, I thought. The name just came out of just a list of names. We just moved forward with one of them that was best, and that’s when we felt passionate about it. |
| 20:26 | Sean Ammirati: That’s really well said. I like the analogy of the bird. Well, Biz, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today. This should be up in the next week or so.Biz Stone: Alright. Thanks, Sean.Sean Ammirati: Thanks, Biz. |
September 6th, 2007 at 12:16 am
[…] week on Read/WriteTalk I had the opportunity to talk to Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. One of the more interesting topics in the podcast was the open platform […]
September 6th, 2007 at 12:16 am
[…] week on Read/WriteTalk I had the opportunity to talk to Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. One of the more interesting topics in the podcast was the open platform […]
September 6th, 2007 at 10:51 am
[…] Biz Stone, Mitgründer von Twitter, auf readwriteweb (bzw. readwritetalk): […]
September 6th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
[…] Full interview here. API part - Biz Stone: Well, it depends on what business model we decide to pursue. We’re still very much weighing our options there, but there are definitely leading contender business models that we have mapped out where the API plays a significant role in generating just more traffic to our system. It puts us in an enviable position.So, the API becomes not only crucial for us on a creativity level and something that we can offer to the developers so that they can build their own applications and experiences, but it also becomes a way for us to grow and a way for us to potentially - depending on what business model we choose - do well there, business-wise. No matter what, we’re going to be considering the API. We’re going to be considering what folks are doing with it going forward so that it becomes part of what we are and what we do. […]
September 6th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
[…] találtuk ki a twittert” ezt hallgattátok már? http://readwritetalk.com/2007/09/05/biz-stone-co-founder-twitter/ RWT /w Biz Stone « előző | tom hjn — 2007. 09. 06. […]
September 8th, 2007 at 6:21 am
[…] Stone talks about Twitter on Read/Write Talk. Although there’s a podcast you can listen to, there’s also a full transcription. I […]
September 8th, 2007 at 6:54 am
[…] week Sean Ammirati sat down with Biz Stone, the Co-Founder of Twitter. Biz talked about his background and how they came up with the idea of […]
September 8th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
[…] I’d like to consider insight from Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. The passage below is from the transcript of a recent podcast interview with Sean Ammirati of Read/WriteTalk (via Fred […]
September 8th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
cool interview (love twitter) but would have liked ?s re downtime, api stability, email harvesting, competitors too.
September 9th, 2007 at 6:59 am
[…] September 9th, 2007 Uncategorized This week on Read/WriteTalk I had the opportunity to talk to Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. One of the more interesting topics in the podcast was the open platform […]
September 9th, 2007 at 7:05 am
[…] week Sean Ammirati sat down with Biz Stone, the Co-Founder of Twitter. Biz talked about his background and how they came up with the idea of […]
September 9th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
[…] September 10th, 2007 Uncategorized This week on Read/WriteTalk I had the opportunity to talk to Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. One of the more interesting topics in the podcast was the open platform […]
September 10th, 2007 at 1:23 am
[…] a very interesting interview with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Sean Ammirati at Read/WriteTalk asks some good questions about the role of the the Twitter API in […]
September 10th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
[…] to keep my own monologue going… Biz Stone makes a strong case for community platforms and web services to enable an API, when he declares that the Twitter API […]
September 10th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
[…] API Traffic is 10x Twitter’s Site http://readwritetalk.com/2007/09/05/biz-stone-co-founder-twitter/ « előző | hirbehozo — 2007. 09. 10. […]
September 11th, 2007 at 2:06 am
Webサービスを成功に導くAPIの公開方法…
私もCSSEZというWebサービスを公開・運用しているのですが、APIの公開方法と公開情報の最適化に頭を悩ませています。どのような情報をどのような形で公開するのが良いのか。そして、そ…
September 11th, 2007 at 2:45 am
[…] 11th, 2007 From Read/Write’s interview with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone Biz Stone: Yeah. The API has been arguably the most important, […]
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[…] Read/WriteTalk » Blog Archive » Biz Stone - Co-Founder Twitter Twitter’s API volume is 10 times its site traffic volume. This is a key point for anyone building a web application today. You must be prepared to integrate and open your application to others. (tags: api twitter podcase bizstone) […]
September 11th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
[…] an interesting interview over at Read/WriteTalk, and as noticed by the ProgrammableWeb, Twitter’s founder Biz Stone claims that Twitter API […]
September 11th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
[…] http://readwritetalk.com/2007/09/05/biz-stone-co-founder-twitter/ […]
September 12th, 2007 at 1:30 am
[…] Read/WriteTalk » Biz Stone - Co-Founder Twitter (tags: interviews twitterpodcast) […]
September 15th, 2007 at 8:12 am
See also the Biz Stone video (40 minutes) of Emerce Eday in Rotterdam:
http://www.marketingfacts.nl/berichten/20070914_eday_2007_biz_stone_twitter/
September 16th, 2007 at 3:59 am
[…] Todd Hoff has an interesting writeup on Scaling Twitter: Making Twitter 10000 Percent Faster. And an interview with Biz Stone (Co-Founder of Twitter) here. […]
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October 15th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
[…] is used 10x more via its API than through its web site. 10x. That speaks for itself, […]
November 9th, 2007 at 5:40 am
[…] seanammirati@gmail.com (Sean Ammirati) added an interesting post on Biz Stone - Co-Founder Twitter.Here’s a small excerpt:In this episode, I sit down with Biz Stone the Co-Founder of Twitter. We talk about his background and how they came up with the idea of Twitter. We also touch on the importance of Open APIs to Twitter’s growth. … […]
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:04 am
[…] seen it’s been so popular that ReadWriteTalk’s Sean Ammirati reported it generates 10x Twitter’s site traffic (our additional coverage here). Now the Twitter team is continuing to scale-up their service to […]
March 17th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
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May 27th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
[…] of the Internet users access Twitter each day. But, that’s not the only thing, according to Biz Stone the Twitter API gets 10x that traffic, bumping Twitter’s daily reach to a very nice 1.1%. […]
May 29th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
[…] Biz stone co-founder twitter […]
June 20th, 2008 at 10:10 am
[…] from the Digg stable, Twitter wasn’t an idea cooked up in a dormroom, it came from Biz Stone (read his history) and Evan Williams, established people in the web industry. Ning has had backing from Marc […]