About eleven months ago (precisely on the 26th of July 2007), I set up an interview with jack Dorsey, Founder and CEO of Twitter. Back then, the messenger service had known a buzz for about three months, and a lot of popular social media enthusiasts were still trying to figure out the benefits of twittering.
I actually got lucky to get this interview with Jack Dorsey, as I didn't really have a site to show where the video would be displayed. Also, part of the luck lies - I think - in that the Founder of Twitter did not verify my "journalist work" before replying with a positive answer to my invitation. The funniest in this story is that I had no idea that the same day I met Jack Dorsey, Twitter was announcing its first venture round (he probably thought I was a smart guy who breached into the secret of their upcoming funds. I wish!).
A year has passed, and yet I feel like the HyveUp interview with Jack Dorsey didn't wrinkle at all. Of course, the poor audiovisual quality always made the tape look old (lack of experience). Still though, the speech of the CEO about his company is still 100% accurate today.
The idea of Twitter came to the Founder as he was working as a courier in 911 dispatch. They had all those entities report describing what the officers were doing right at the moment. Jack wanted the same thing for his friends, and that's where the idea came from.
A few weeks ago, Twitter announced a second round of funds. The amazing part is that Twitter is exactly what it was a year ago. No additional features, enriched designs, video integration, leaderboards, groups...
That's because Twitter is not building an application. Twitter is building a social messaging engine. The company is focused on storing and retrieving short-messages. Apparently, things are not that easy. Those past few months, the attention was stuck on Twitter's periodic service outages.
Twitter is also building a brand. 56% of Twitter users tweet through the Twitter website (the blue area on the pie, source). 44% use Twitter through third-party applications. Only a powerful brand can federate and control such a market deployment. Without Twitter's popularity, third-party development opportunities would not exist. By working its brand appeal, Twitter talks the open-source community into developing the very own Twitter user base.
