TXTmob and Twitter: A Reply to Nick Bilton
[Note: This piece was originally published on the Public Practice Studio website on Oct 16, 2013. I’ve updated some of the links in this version, the original is archived here.]
Nick Bilton’s October 13 New York Times Magazine story, “All’s Fair in Love and Twitter,” describes the heady, early days of Twitter. The article begins with Jack Dorsey sitting atop a slide in a “rinky dink” Silicon Valley playground sometime in 2006, expounding his vision of a microblogging platform to a handful of Silicon Valley techies and entrepreneurs who would go on to create one of the most popular web services in the world. Bilton then proceeds to chronicle the trials and tribulations — and particularly the infighting — that the company and its founders went through to realize Dorsey’s vision, and bring it to market.
It’s a compelling story. Unfortunately, it isn’t true.
While Dorsey has made something of a career out of claiming to be the inventor of Twitter, the truth is that, like many other technical innovations, Twitter didn’t leap fully-formed out of the mind of a solitary genius. It built on substantial prior work.
Twitter’s roots can be traced back to the 2004 Republican National Convention, when protesters relied on custom-built software to coordinate actions, report on police movements, and share their…
