Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as tweets. It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity with over 300 million users as of 2011, generating over 300 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It has been described as the SMS of the Internet. Jack Dorsey was born on November 19, 1976. He is an American software architect and businessman widely known as the creator of Twitter and as the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company. In 2008, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
JACK DORSEY
EVAN WILLIAMS
BIZ STONE
When he first saw implementations of instant messaging, Dorsey had wondered if the software's user status output could be shared among friends easily. He approached Odeo, who at the time happened to be interested in text messaging. Dorsey and Biz Stone decided that SMS text suited the status message idea, and built a prototype of Twitter in about two weeks. The idea attracted many users at Odeo and investment from Evan Williams who had left Google after selling them Pyra Labs and Blogger. Dorsey, Stone, and Williams co-founded Obvious which then spun off Twitter, Inc. As chief executive officer, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of funding by the venture capitalists who backed the company. On October 16 2008, Williams took over the role of CEO and Dorsey became chairman of the board. On March 28 2011, Dorsey returned to Twitter as Executive Chairman. As the service grew in popularity, Dorsey chose improving uptime as top priority, even over creating revenue which Twitter was not designed to earn. Dorsey described the commercial use of Twitter and its API as two things that could lead to paid features. His three guiding principles which are shared by the whole company and through its culture, are simplicity, constraint and craftsmanship.
EVAN WILLIAMS - BIZ STONE - JACK DORSEY
