Success stories don’t always have to start with big numbers or outrageous hits to finally turn into something really cool. Evan Henshaw-Plath , co-creator of Twitter , explained in EmTechSpain that the microblogging platform was born from a resounding failure.
At a time of high unemployment, several friends launched a project to reinvent classic radio and create an Internet radio platform for podcasting. They worked 16 hours a day and 7 days a week, and thus Odeo.com was born. And although the critics were very good, and the optimistic investors, the users did not arrive and, finally Apple integrated the software iTunes to listen to the radio. Then, after a hackerton (meeting of programmers and designers to generate ideas and prototypes), the microblogging project began to take shape.
At first it was quite different from the social network we know today. “I had no vowels to begin with,” Henshaw-Plath comments wryly. That Twttr was a kind of “friend stalker”, which was designed to send short messages at all hours and about anything. It was used only via mobile phone – hence the limitation of 140 characters, which was given by the size of the sms – and it was paid. It had few users, but they were very fanatical and used it at all times.
Investors called the idea “stupid” and withdrew, but “a team member named Evan Williams, who was fortunate enough to sell his first company to Google years before (actually, like any entrepreneur, his first company was not unsuccessful, which was perhaps the fifth), he decided to buy the platform for 3 million dollars, “explains Heshaw-Plath. As the idea was very popular among computer scientists, an internal system was created to use it on computers and to be able to chat between programmers. Then they added the vowels and in the end Twitter was born, which from a well-known music festival in the US began to have a massive use, left the label of failure and became success. In total, 3 years of work, prototypes thrown, changes of course, and so on. “The great initial idea rarely exists,” concludes the narrator of this story.
What you learn from the history of Twitter, according to Henshaw-Plath, is that ” you learn from failure; you learn to innovate by discarding ideas that would not work, throwing out prototypes, making mistakes … “
The intimate becomes public
” Twitter lets you tell what you have for breakfast or what is your first thought when you open your eyes, ” adds Henshaw-Plath when asked what makes him unique. “In Twitter the intimate is made public, but simultaneously the user is not forced to use the real name,” he adds. According to him, what defines Twiiter is that the message you send to the outside world can be read by anyone; It is different from Facebook, designed to communicate non-anonymously and in circles of people selected by yourself.
On the other hand, Henshaw-Plath is convinced that the next person with a great idea like Twitter will be the one who decides to take a simple and real problem that affects him / her and solve it . “After all, Zuckerberg invented Facebook to solve the very universal problem of dating in college,” he jokes.
