Twitter Was Almost Just An Idea
The story behind Jack Dorsey’s world-changing app
Imagine yourself sitting on an idea that would one day change the world around you. Imagine yourself pushing that idea aside, just because the technology needed for it wasn’t available yet. It’s the idea of a lifetime, yet you can’t utilize it simply because it’s far fetched and unheard of. For Jack Dorsey this idea was Twitter, and now it has become one of the most influential and widely used ideas to date.
Dorsey had a strange passion as a child.
He grew up in downtown St. Louis, so naturally, he fell in love with cities. He also loved to code, so he would practice by coding cities onto his computer.
He also loved to listen to police scanners because he was fascinated at how first responders were always able to stay in communication and know each other’s locations. This laid the seed for Dorsey to come up with Twitter, because when he coded he could code in police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, and taxis, but not citizens. When he would look at his live image of a city living and breathing on the computer screen, he would always wonder where the citizens were and what they were doing.
In 2000, he wrote a simple code where he could send an email from his Blackberry to several different recipients at the same time. To test out his new idea, Dorsey went to a bison park in San Francisco and sent an email to his family and friends, telling them that he was in the park. After he hit send he realized two things: no one cared, and no one else had a Blackberry at the time. This made him sideline the idea and save it for later.
Fast-forward to 2006, Dorsey was working for a podcast company called Odeo. Dorsey wasn’t fascinated by podcasting, and he soon found out that his co-workers didn’t like it either. So, in an effort to pique their interests, Dorsey and his co-workers pitched Dorsey’s idea of a social platform to Odeo, and they ran with it. Odeo gave Dorsey one week to program the platform and test it out.
But Dorsey’s idea was actually possible now.
Back in 2000, there wasn’t a messaging system available that could cross over between different carriers like Verizon to AT&T. Now in 2006, SMS was being used, and people had better cell phones to communicate with each other. Dorsey decided to dust off his old “location sharing” idea and give it life. After the week that Odeo gave to Dorsey to create this platform, Twitter was born, and the very first tweet was “just setting up my twttr.”
Why 140 characters?
Simple. Dorsey fell in love with SMS messaging, and in 2006, SMS character limit was 160, and if you went over the limit, it would spill out onto later messages. For Dorsey, he saw this as an opportunity to fix that problem, and he went with 140 characters, leaving 20 for the sender’s username.
Twitter was almost an overnight success. It spread from co-worker to co-worker and each shared with their families and friends. In the first two years of its creation, Twitter had over 6 million users tweeting information. Twitter eventually bought out Odeo, and Dorsey was named CEO.
However, in 2008, Dorsey lost his position as CEO for leaving work early. He left to enjoy his other personal interests such as sewing and drawing, and according to his co-workers, frequently partying. Dorsey was offered a “passive” and “silent” role on the board.
During his time away from CEO, Dorsey “went rogue” by planting numerous stories in the media saying that he was the sole visionary and architect of the platform.
However In 2010, the CEO position was offered to Richard Costolo, Twitter’s COO at the time, and Dorsey was promoted from a passive board member to Executive Chairman. In 2015, Costolo stepped down from the CEO position and Dorsey stepped up, which created suspicion as to whether Dorsey could handle his second chance as CEO.
So far, Dorsey’s position as CEO has had a positive impact on the company. As soon as the news came out about Dorsey being the company’s permanent CEO, their stocks rose (+2.01%). Twitter’s new COO Adam Bain told Fortune that Dorsey’s “got the senior staff working better together than at any point in our history.”
Dorsey’s history with Twitter has been eventful nonetheless, but through the hardships and setbacks throughout his career, Dorsey was able to push through and make his idea a tangible thing. Twitter is now being used by over 328 million people who tweet over 500 million tweets per day. Twitter has transformed the way we communicate and share information, and very notable, powerful, and influential people use Twitter as their main basis of sharing and receiving information. It’s safe to say that if Twitter was just an idea left in Dorsey’s head, the world would be a much different place.
