What was interesting about that MVP is that it was fun to use, even with just the 15 or so people in the office. And it was still fun to use when it was opened up to fifty close friends and family a few weeks later. Not all social software works with so few people while also scaling to work with so many people.
It's interesting how two veery big services came from the idea of setting up a real-time status.
Early Twitter as I remember was that when you post the status your followers would get an SMS notification with the status.
Jack mentions that here of a real-time status and also the same for WhatsApp. Where WhatsApp inventors thought about a way to set up a real-time status.
But they pivoted to something different. Only that Twitter is still more close to the original idea.
I think? There was a time fb forced a "pests is... " format for updates and I very distinctly remember them removing it to better match some other service of the time. I thought Twitter but maybe Myspace, it's been so long.
In their defence, it's unlikely that the situation would have been much different without Twitter. There are plenty of other ways for narcissists to micro-publish on the Internet.
I like Noah, but I don't think this is really true.
Twitter was spun out of Odeo and that spin out was based on Ev's money and Jack's idea.
In the spin out, Ev & Jack were basically recruiting out of the Odeo team. Some of us didn't want to go along. I just up and quit, I was so frustrated there. But Noah did want to continue and wasn't taken along.
This all went down when Twitter was in a very, very weak position, i.e. didn't really have any value other than the fact that Ev & Jack wanted to work on it. It probably had 200 users or even less. This is a classic case of the idea is worthless and the execution is everything. Ev & Jack were the ones carrying the ability to execute this.
So, Noah getting hosed really comes down to he wanted a job and didn't get it. I know that hurts, but it doesn't deserve to be the scandal that Nick Bilton made it out to be.
For the scandal to work, people try to latch on to Twitter being prototyped inside the Odeo corporate entity which would make Noah a founder. That entity was dead though. Audio blogging and podcasting directories didn't work in 2005. That's what Noah really co-founded. And so in the break up of the company, Ev bought all the assets. There was no other buyer, no other source of funding, or even a desire to keep any of the products alive. Noah did end up with stock in the new Twitter and that makes it a pretty good outcome for him.
I still have the coffee cup they handed out to employees when they brought up the origin story during an all hands once. Can’t remember if it was 2010 or 2011 I got the cup. Still have it and use it. Has the old Twttr logo on it.
> If we had the sketch to how toilet paper was first developed would we hold it this level of reverence?
Yes, of course. In fact, it'd probably be a museum piece.
> What is the fascination with such trivial technologies grabbing a mindshare?
The same as with your fascination with this fascination; ie., we like to try to understand what makes people do what they do. There's an inner sociologist in most of us.
I have a dossier of drawings/sketches on ideas for apps/websites. An idea comes to mind, I start writing and drawing. I keep all of them. Every now and then I go through them and add a couple more pages of drawings, notes, something I read, some new technology that will solve one or another problem, something that can be combined with something else.
Seeing Jack's drawing and reading the description on how Twitter took 5-6 years from "idea" to first implementation shows that this system/method works (at least it worked for him). I do not claim I will design the next twitter-size-business, but hey, it is a mental exercise.
I believe that many in this forum have the imagination, methodology, discipline to build on an idea, and we see plenty of "Show HN" to prove this right.
If the invention of toilet paper has an equally exciting story.. (I read about it a few days ago)(not exciting imho)(great thing for humanity though!)
I see what you are saying. But to me it's uninspiring. It cannot be replicated. It's a simple tool that's overblown. There isn't a technology behind it. I just saw a piece of news saying it took their engineering and design team many months if not a year to rollout a simple design change. That's not inspiring at all. If anything this would be something I would strive hard to avoid.
Neither the technology nor the product seem to jump out of the paper... Just like toilet paper. Which is not bad but doesn't require more attention.
The other problem is around this set of ideas that grab users attention for quick bites that are essentially empty calories. I feel that these are gamified, product hacked versions that are hard to replicate but ultimately not inspiring.
I find it infuriating. It drives home how insurmountable someone else’s first mover advantage and subsequent network effects can be. I say this as someone who had great success in my niche, I’m often angry about my own success and sympathize with my competitors who failed to catch up for no reason other than that they weren’t the first to do what I did.
Today no one can turn their own micropublishing idea into a Twitter competitor, because by the time it achieves even 0.1% of Twitter’s success, Twitter will just clone its features to kill its momentum.
That’s life though. This is one of the first ‘it’s a you’ problem everyone has to get over sooner or later. Sorry, it’s sounds dismissive, but there’s really no other answer to this.
Facebook clones features or as a company has various spin offs. I thought twitter stayed pretty true to form?
Although your point stands. If you are using a cool feature to differentiate and that feature is cloneable, there is risk that one of the large players will implement it.
