Twience, The Science of Twitter

Wow… I never knew… Now I do!

I’m glad to know a little “twhistory” about Twitter, quite interesting to learn the ideas that sparked such an amazing and growing phenomenon…

A Short Twitter History Lesson

Okay, so my comment (see above) to @Dom‘s post was more than 140 characters, but still a good comment. Twitter has an interesting “birth story”, and goes to show just what can happen when a really good idea catches on…

I suppose you could call this my first TWIENCE project.

@Dom tells us a little:

I was lucky enough to be in @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.

According to @Dom, this group he was in, was a result of some “down-sizing” of a larger company (at the time) called Odeo, Inc. They were into the podcasting thing. Shortly afterwards, Odeo, Inc. was sold and is now doing something related to RSS searches or something.

More from @Dom:

@Jack’s idea rose to the top as a combination of status-type ideas. @Jack and @Noah were assigned to build version 0.1 while the rest of the company focused on maintaining Odeo.com, so that if this new thing flopped we’d have something to fall back upon. The first version of @Jack’s idea was entirely web-based. It was created on March 31st, 2006. My first substantive message is #38:

oh this is going to be addictive

We struggled with a codename and a product name. “It’s FriendStalker!” joked @Crystal, our most prolific user.

Now that’s funny!

Now, at this time, all of these people, @Jack, @Biz, @Noah, @Crystal, @Jeremy, @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, @Ev, @Dom, @Rabble, @RayReadyRay, @Florian, @TimRoberts, and @Blaine were still “officially” employees of Odeo, Inc. But things were NOT looking good for the company. Cuts were recommended by the Odeo, Inc. management, and a few people were “let go”. Kinda like what’s happening nowadays with the USA economy in a stall.

@Dom goes on to say:

We launched Twttr Beta on @Ev’s birthday. We could now invite a slightly larger circle of friends, but still excluding any large companies (with a few trusted exceptions within places like Google). I’ll never forget the family-friendly feeling of that day. We all knew that we were going to change the world with this thing that no one else understood. That day stands out in memory as the deep breath before a baby’s first cry.

As you can probably tell, Twitter is no longer a “baby”. A conservative number, based on my research, of current Twitter users updating “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less, is about 6,000,000. Yes, that’s SIX MILLION. That’s a lot…

Some are projecting growth to be around two or three times that by the end of the year 2009. There are also rumors of some monetizing thoughts going on in the collective heads of the folks at Obvious.com.

Feel free to read the inspiration of this post @ How Twitter Was Born

And, of course, learn more about HOW TO USE Twitter,
by clicking there >>> Underground Secret Twitter Manifesto

EDIT (June 21) — Also, in the interest of giving you a choice on how to best learn Twitter, check this post out: Announcing Twitter Traffic Swarm!

C ya!
Dave Twye, the Twience Guy