Writing about Jack Dorsey and Twitter
First, I must say that I am using twitter on a daily -if not hourly- basis : I’ve even integrated it to l’Ouvre-Boite, as you can see just below the header. It’s a new approach to online communication between people : one-to-many, asynchronous and efficient (short) and a very well built tool with API’s and many external services using it. The 18 month year-old twitter is definitely one of the hottest start-up, here in San Francisco. I was given the opportunity to visit their “offices” and meet Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO as part of the Sillicon Valley Study Trip, and I must say that I was very surprised.
Twitter is actually a “spin-off” of the Odeo Team. Odeo is a website dedicated to podcasting, but Jack told us that the team wasn’t passionate about podcasting, which was really a true problem to be innovative and motivated. Prior to Odeo, Jack worked as a programmer at a taxi- and courier-dispatch company. If you’re using Instant Messaging software, you might have noticed that you can set-up a “status” to tell your connection what you’re doing “on the phone”, “busy”, “working on a presentation”. Jack describes Twitter as a service to “dispatch” your IM’s status : this was very surprising to me, because this is not at all the way I am using twitter!
My main usage is not tell what I am doing, but rather to ask question, raise problems or even share thoughts, but not telling my friends what I’m doing! Check my profile! and you’ll see that most of my contacts are not telling what they’re doing -and the only one who does, here, even says that it’s not interesting! I see Twitter as a tool for conversation, but it definitely wasn’t built this way. Want another proof? Conversation are made of replies : Twitter’s reply system is pretty “basic” and was actually “invented” by users. No wonder why twitter doesn’t allow user to post images, videos or links : they are nos expressing any status!
Anyway, Twitter is great success today. Jack thinks that it’s mainly due to the fact that you twitter is a “out-of-web” service with APIs: you can use twitter by SMS only, for example, or at least on many different sites and services : Facebook, Seesmic…
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