Twttr sketch (2006)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jackdorsey/182613360/in/photostream/

by radkapital • 6 years ago

129 39 6 years ago

flickr.com

travbrack• 6 years ago

The intended purpose was so innocent and naive.

radkapital2• 6 years ago

who would have thought it would turn into POTUS chief medium of communication then

sjwright2• 6 years ago

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.

slim• 6 years ago

I'd argue twitter made POTUS not the other way around

sneak• 6 years ago

i’d still love a one liner list of all of my friends’ statuses.

madaxe_again• 6 years ago

It was another age, back when vowels were unevenly redistributed between startups and the only typefaces were VAG rundschrift and frutiger.

egfx• 6 years ago

I love the word.ed domains

Except worded domains that begin with https://2fb.me that try to deliver tweets beyond its boundaries.

Twitter has been a bane to this service for many generations.

exogeny• 6 years ago

Noah Glass got hosed.

tonystubblebine2• 6 years ago

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.

jonchurch_• 6 years ago

Just as interesting to me is the MVP screenshot that precedes this photo https://www.flickr.com/photos/jackdorsey/182614595/in/photos...

anarchogeek• 6 years ago

Oh shit, that's my old phone number... before i switched my account to have @rabble. ;-D

radkapital2• 6 years ago

Woah, was just reading the chapter where it described you in the Hatching Twitter book. Didn't know you hung out here too.

kristopolous• 6 years ago

This is how MVPs are done, and should be done, in 2020, still, every time.

tonystubblebine2• 6 years ago

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.

rukshn• 6 years ago

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.

noitsnot2• 6 years ago

That's interesting because I look at the date of 2006 and the drawing and say he was about a year or so behind The Facebook's status update.

pram• 6 years ago

and they’re all years behind AIM profile updates with the hottest linkin park lyrics

pests• 6 years ago

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.

evmar• 6 years ago

If you look at old LiveJournal the short posting form felt a lot like twitter. Here's what LJ content looked like on the day of that Flickr post:

https://brad.livejournal.com/2000/05/31/

(Edit: switched the link to match the flickr post.)

heyarviind• 6 years ago

Why there are so many girls in comments on twttr

missedthecue• 6 years ago

Theyre bots

niksmac• 6 years ago

Look at all his lady fans, lol.

mindfulplay2• 6 years ago

If we had the sketch to how toilet paper was first developed would we hold it this level of reverence?

What is the fascination with such trivial technologies grabbing a mindshare?

HenryBemis• 6 years ago

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!)

icebraining• 6 years ago

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.

runawaybottle2• 6 years ago

Because it’s inspiring. A lot of our ideas look as simple as that, and it’s good from time to time to remember that it can be done.

FriendlyNormie• 6 years ago

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.

mindfulplay2• 6 years ago

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.

thickbill• 6 years ago

I wouldn't call twitter nor toilet paper trivial. Speaking of toilet paper: https://www.etsy.com/no-en/listing/267715178/toilet-paper-pa...

someonehere• 6 years ago

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.

WorldPeas• 6 years ago

What's the deal with the bots?

Twttr sketch (2006)

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