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Archive for the ‘New Technology’ Category

Dom Sagolla

Twitter was born about three years ago, when @Jack, @Biz, @Noah, @Crystal, @Jeremy, @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, @Ev, me (@Dom), @Rabble, @RayReadyRay, @Florian, @TimRoberts, and @Blaine worked at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc. in South Park, San Francisco. The company had just contributed a major chunk of code to Rails 1.0 and had just shipped Odeo Studio, but we were facing tremendous competition from Apple and other heavyweights. Our board was not feeling optimistic, and we were forced to reinvent ourselves.

“Rebooting” or reinventing the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where we broke up into teams to talk about our best ideas. I was lucky enough to be in @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.

I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.” His idea was to make it so simple that you don’t even think about what you’re doing, you just type something and send it. Typing something on your phone in those days meant you were probably messing with T9 text input, unless you were sporting a relatively rare smartphone. Even so, everyone in our group got the idea instantly and wanted it.

Later, each group presented their ideas, and a few of them were selected for prototyping. Demos ensued. @Jack’s idea rose to the top as a combination of status-type ideas. @Jack, @Biz, and @Florian were assigned to build version 0.1, managed by @Noah. The rest of the company focused on maintaining Odeo.com, so that if this new thing flopped we’d have something to fall back upon.

The first version of @Jack’s idea was entirely web-based. It was created on March 21st, 2006. My first substantive message is #38: “oh this going to be addictive.”

We struggled with a codename and a product name. “It’s FriendStalker!” joked @Crystal, our most prolific user. The userbase was limited entirely to the company and our immediate family. No one from a major company of any kind was allowed in. For months, we were in Top Secret Alpha because of competing products like the now-defunkt Dodgeball.  The original product name / codename “twttr” was inspired by Flickr and the fact that American SMS shortcodes are five characters. We prototyped with “10958″ as our shortcode. (We later changed to “40404″ for ease of use and memorability.) @Florian was commuting from Germany, so in order to operate with him we secured a “long code”, or a full 10-digit phone number linked to a small-potatoes gateway.  Twttr probably had about 50 users in the 10958 days.

I was following everyone on the system. We had an admin page where you could see every user. As Head of Quality for the company, it seemed like my duty to watch for opinions or issues from our users. This caused confusion, though, when family members of our team were suddenly being followed by a seemingly random person. Thus, Private Accounts were born. @Jack and @Florian created a means for users to mark themselves private, and we admins had the ability to tell who wanted to be private so we’d know not to follow them. Actual, real privacy with secure protection came a bit later. I’d say there were about 100 users when Private was invented.

The interaction model and the visual metaphor for the service were constantly in flux. The meaning of being someone’s “Friend” versus “Following” someone changed regularly. At that point, you could either get all SMS messages or get none. There was no Twictionary back then; data in the system were referred to as “posts” or just “messages”. The lack of clear terminology led to some pretty spirited debates leading up to the Spring of 2006.

We launched Twttr Beta on @Ev’s birthday. We could now invite a slightly larger circle of friends, but still excluding any large companies (with a few trusted exceptions within places like Google). I’ll never forget the family-friendly feeling of that day. We all knew that we were going to change the world with this thing that no one else understood. That day stands out in memory as the deep breath before a baby’s first cry.

Meanwhile, Odeo and the corporate board were at a tension point. Not only was the value of Twttr difficult to describe, the relevance of Odeo was declining monthly. Drastic cuts were recommended. One day in early May 2006, @Ev let four of us go: @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, me, and @Rabble. @Noah and @TimRoberts would later be asked to leave as well. It was a tough decision and huge shock to each of us. We all handled it differently. Looking back on it, I think Twitter allowed us to stay connected when we might not have otherwise been. After all, we weren’t even public with the site yet, so each of us continued to add value just by using it with each other.

During this transition, Twttr.com launched to the public. Still, very few people understood its value. At the time most people were paying per SMS message, and so wouldn’t Twttr run up our bills? Also, how were we supposed to use this thing and who cares what I’m doing? Each one of us original users became a kind of personal evangelist for Twttr, trying to get our coworkers and friends to use it. At this point, Obvious Corp was born as an incubator with Twttr as its sole project.

@Jack was still just an engineer, and the service was only a few months old when the group acquired Twitter.com and re-branded. Back then, we had no character limit on our system. Messages longer than 160 characters (the common SMS carrier limit) were split into multiple texts and delivered (somewhat) sequentially. There were other bugs, and a mounting SMS bill. The team decided to place a limit on the number of characters that would go out via SMS for each post. They settled on 140, in order to leave room for the username and the colon in front of the message. In February of 2007 @Jack wrote something which inspired me to get started on this project: “One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters.”

Just in time for SxSW, @RayReadyRay rigged a very sweet Flash-based visualizer that ended up on display on the halls of the conference. I wasn’t working there, but I used to visit regularly to see how our baby was doing. I happened to be at the office in SF when the visualizer went live on site in Austin. I remember finding a bug just before showtime, as @Biz and @Jeremy talked over the phone. Everything miraculously fell into place by the time people filtered out of the sessions to see their comments floating along the hallway screens.

Boom #1: Twitter won an award in the Blog category, and @Jack thanked everyone in 140 characters.  MTV Music Awards: Boom #2.  Apple WWDC 2007, and then TV, and then print and pretty soon Cable news: Boom #3.

@Jack became the CEO of a newly spun-off Twitter, Inc. during the Boom Times. People still didn’t quite “get it” but at least some people had heard about it. The team created permalinks and RSS feeds. @Blaine pushed for IM integration. Each major feature added tremendous gains in users, and in usage per user. Still small by social networking standards, Twitter delivered something immediate and vital that no other service could attain.

For a lot of people, the entire API launch was really the time when Twitter first left the nest. But that is another story, for another time.

David Weinberger

Monday’s WSJ had a good article by Sarah Needleman on companies using Twitter as a public relations tool.

Obviously, companies are paying attention to Twitter because lots of people have joined it; if it were a startup with 500 users, big companies wouldn’t care about it. But the way the massness of Twitter works may be teaching companies a lesson about the Web overall, and about markets.

Traditionally, marketing views a market as the set of potential customers — roughly, the people who are or might be made interested in the company’s offerings, and who are in a position to make a purchase. Marketers then segment their market according to some defining characteristics relevant to how the company can pique their interest and move them to completing a sale. Which means that messages define markets: Marketers choose age or ethnicity as the defining characteristics (for example) only if they think that those traits carve off a set of people susceptible to the same message.

Now, Twitter has this odd property of being able to support multiple scales: It works if you’re Ashton Kutcher with two million followers or if you’re a college kid with four followers. For Kutcher, Twitter is a mass medium. For most of his followers, it’s a far more social medium. This ability to work easily and simultaneously at scales separated by orders of magnitude is distinctive of the Web itself. Oh, sure, you could organize a phone bank to reach two million folks with your message, but that’s the opposite of an easy and natural use of telephones. For the Web, it’s just what it does.

Marketers are among those not used to this sort of continuity of scaling. Traditional marketing has aimed for the efficiencies bigger scales bring. Even the 1990s interest in “personalization” was a type of mass customization. So, it’s interesting to watch as marketers try to adjust to this new, slippery environment. The companies cited in the WSJ article seem not to be paying attention exclusively to Twitterers with huge followings. That by itself is a useful webby lesson to learn. But will marketers figure out how to make marketing scalable up and down, without violating norms?

David Weinberger is the co-author of the The Cluetrain Manifesto, the bestseller that cut through the hype and told business what the Web was really about. More information about David’s speaking availability can be found at Speakers.com.

Eileen McDargh

Last week, my big desktop PC crashed, my laptop got the “blue screen: of death”. The refrigerator croaked, and the toaster oven went the heaven.  My I-phone decided to stop receiving e-mail and the dashboard in my car kept erroneously sending warning messages.

It wasn’t even a full moon!

As marvelous as all our technology is, chronic malfunctions and crashes and the constant demand to keep up might account for the fact that at least one in four of us will admit to physically assaulting a device.  There’s even a ratio for judging the attack because the chances of failure are in direct proportion to the urgency of the task they are needed for. Hence the scream heard from my assistant as she tried to get out my summer newsletter before autumn.

It doesn’t get better. The 2009 March/April issue of Psychotherapy Networker says that such chronic, unalleviated stress compromises our cognitive and emotional functions as well as undermining our immune system. Nor does it when a workplace (often unknowingly) contrives urgency by leashing employees with PDAs, laptops, pagers, and anything else for instant access and response.

Well intentioned.  And ultimately a timewaster and a driver of increased health care costs.

What happens is that we continually try to multitask, toggling back and forth, answering the ping of instant messages, and wind up feeling constantly “on”. Instead of concentrating on one task, we unconsciously scan for the next message or task, thus spending often 50% more time on one job before taking on another.

Ways to conquer the beast:

1.    Manage your energy not your time.  You don’t run marathons every day yet we try and do the equivalent at our work.  Studies of energy suggest a 90-minute rhythm. This means stopping and doing something to recovers your energy expenditure. (Coffee and chocolate don’t count. Nor does smoking). Take a 4-minute relaxation break. Walk outside, deep breathe, trying biofeedback. Go outside. Drink water. And when it’s time—go home without work.

2.    Program your computer to delete messages after 30 days. If no one has screamed by then, how important could it be?

3.    Send out the equivalent of a “do not disturb” sign, telling folks you will respond from 3-4pm daily. If it’s an emergency – call you.

4.    Turn off rings, pings, dings, and anything that sings.

5.    Distinguish between uninterrupted work time and answer time.

6.    Work with your team to determine the important and urgent from the unimportant.

7.    Cut to cord. If you continue to remain connected all the time—you have only yourself to blame with the constant barrage of requests.

8.    At the end of the day, reset to zero. You did what you could. It’s done. Over. Finito. Do NOT plan tomorrow today. Your brain will start working on it and there goes the sleep. Shut the door of your office. Turn off the computer. Reset to zero. Tomorrow is a new day.

9.    Do NOT take the PDA to bed with you.  Give it a rest. Give all of us a rest.

Without boundaries, Tyrannosaurus Techno will win again.

Eileen McDargh is widely regarded as a top business thought leader and leadership consultant.  More information about her speaking availability can be found at Speakers.com.

Last month we introduced you to the Amazon Kindle DX, and today it is available to order.

With a beautiful large screen, Kindle DX’s display is ideal for a broad range of reading material, including graphic-rich books, PDFs, newspapers, magazines and blogs. Kindle DX’s display is two and a half times the size of the Kindle display. Whether you’re reading the latest bestseller or a financial report, text and images are amazingly sharp on the 9.7-inch screen.

Kindle DX is as thin as a magazine and holds up to 3,500 books. With Kindle DX’s native PDF support, you can carry and read your personal and professional libraries on the go. In addition to the new large display format and incredible storage capacity, the Kindle DX also boasts an Auto-Rotating Screen which changes from portrait to landscape mode as you turn the device so you can view full-width maps, graphs, tables, and Web pages.

Kindle DX Features
•Slim: Just over 1/3 of an inch, as thin as most magazines
•Carry Your Library: Holds up to 3,500 books, periodicals, and documents
•Beautiful Large Display: 9.7” diagonal e-ink screen reads like real paper; boasts 16 shades of gray for clear text and sharp images
•Auto-Rotating Screen: Display auto-rotates from portrait to landscape as you turn the device so you can view full-width maps, graphs, tables, and Web pages
•Built-in PDF Reader: Native PDF support allows you to carry and read all of your personal and work documents on the go
•Wireless: 3G wireless lets you download books right from your Kindle DX, anytime, anywhere; no monthly fees, service plans, or hunting for Wi-Fi hotspots
•Books in Under 60 Seconds: You get free wireless delivery of books in less than 60 seconds; no PC required
•Long Battery Life: Read for days without recharging
•Read-to-Me: With the text-to-speech feature, Kindle DX can read newspapers, magazines, blogs, and books out loud to you, unless the book’s rights holder made the feature unavailable
•Big Selection, Low Prices: Over 300,000 books;New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases are only $9.99, unless marked otherwise
•More Than Books: U.S. and international newspapers including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, magazines including The New Yorker and Time, plus popular blogs, all auto-delivered wirelessly

Order yours today