Great Piece on the Brains Behind Twitter
The Wall Street Journal had a great read over the weekend about the backstory of two of the three guys who started Twitter. (To those of us on Twitter who want to keep up with their goings-on, they’re known as @ev and @biz.) Not sure why they didn’t include @jack in the story, but it’s still a great read.
Even faster than Google, Amazon and eBay in their days, the three-year-old Twitter has become deeply embedded in the culture. President Barack Obama twittered the words, “We just made history,” on the night of his election. It was a twittered image that first captured the forced landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. Scores of people trapped in the Mumbai terrorist attack twittered desperately for help. And in a much discussed event, a San Francisco technology writer twittered his surprise to discover his home was being broken into.
Strictly speaking, Twitter is a social networking application that enables users to post short text messages — called “tweets” — of no more than 140 characters on their personal feed. These real-time diary entries can then be read by other users, called “followers,” who have subscribed to that page.
But Twitter is much more than a novel way to share updates of one’s daily life with friends. It’s now evolved into a powerful new marketing and communications tool. Regional emergency preparedness organizations are looking at Twitter as a way to reach millions of people during a disaster. NASA is using it to regularly update interested parties about the status of space shuttle flights. And one journalist solicited help from fellow Twitterers to get himself out of an Egyptian jail. (It worked.)
