twitter evan williams TED2009

Four years ago on the TED stage, I announced a company I was working with at the time called Odeo. Because of that announcement, we got a big article in the New York Times, which led to more press, which led to more attention and me deciding to become CEO of that company whereas I was just an adviser. We started raising venture capital and ramping up hiring. One of the guys I hired was an engineer named Jack Dorsey. A year later, we were trying to decide which way to go with Odeo. Jack presented an idea that he'd been tinkering around with for a number of years, based around sending simple status updates to friends. We were also playing with SMS at the time at Odeo, so we kind of put two and two together. In early 2006, we launched Twitter as a side project at Odeo. Now, it's hard to justify doing a side project at a startup where focus is so critical, but I had actually launched Blogger as a side project in my previous company, thinking it was just a little thing we do on the side, and it ended up taking over not only the company but my life for the next five or six years. So I learned to kind of follow hunches even though you can't necessarily justify them or know where they're going to go, and that's kind of what's happened with Twitter time after time. For those of you unfamiliar, Twitter is based around a very simple, seemingly trivial concept: you say what you're doing in 140 characters or less, and people who are interested in you get those updates. If they're really interested, they get the update as a text message on their cell phone. So for instance, I made a Twitter right now that I'm giving a talk at TED. In my case, when I hit send, up to 60,000 people will receive that message in a matter of seconds. Now, the fundamental idea is that Twitter lets people share moments of their lives whenever they want, be they momentous occasions or mundane ones. It's by sharing these moments as they're happening that lets people feel more connected and in touch despite distance, and in real time. This is the primary use we saw of Twitter from the beginning, and what got us excited. What we didn't anticipate was the many, many other uses that would evolve from this very simple system. One of the things we realized was how important Twitter could be during real-time events. When the wildfires broke out in San Diego in October 2007, people turned to Twitter to report what was happening and to find information from neighbors about what was happening around them. But it wasn't just individuals. The LA Times actually turned to Twitter to dispense information as well and put a Twitter feed on the front page. The LA Fire Department and Red Cross used it to dispense news and updates as well. At this event, dozens of people here are twittering, and thousands of people around the world are following along because they want to know what it feels like to be here and what's happening. Among the other interesting things that have cropped up are many things from businesses, from marketing and communications, and predictable things to an insanely popular Korean barbecue taco truck that drives around LA and Twitters where it stops, causing a line to form around the block. Politicians have recently begun twittering. In fact, there are 47 members of Congress who currently have Twitter accounts, and they're tweeting — in some cases from behind closed door sessions with the president. In this case, this guy's not liking what he's hearing. The president himself is our most popular Twitter user, although his tweets have dropped off as of lately, while Senator McCain's have picked up as of this guy. Twitter was originally designed as pretty much a broadcast medium: you send one message and it goes out to everybody, and you receive the messages you're interested in. One of the many ways that users shaped the evolution of Twitter was by inventing a way to reply to a specific person or specific message. So this syntax, the @username that Shaquille O'Neal is using here to reply to one of his fans, was completely invented by users. We didn't build it into the system until it already became popular, and then we made it easier. This is one of many ways that users have shaped the system. The other is via the API. We built an application programming interface, which basically means programmers can write software that interacts with Twitter. We currently know of over 2,000 pieces of software that can send Twitter updates, interfaces from Mac, Windows, your iPhone, your Blackberry, as well as things like a device that lets an unborn baby Twitter when it kicks, or a plant Twitter when it needs watered. Probably the most important third-party development came from a little company in Virginia called Summize. They built a Twitter search engine, and they tapped into the fact that if you have millions of people around the world talking about what they're doing and what's happening around them, you have an incredible resource to find out what's happening among any topic or event while it's going on. This really changed how we perceived Twitter. For instance, here's what people are saying about TED. This is another way that our mind has shifted, and Twitter wasn't originally what we thought it was. We liked this so much that we actually bought the company and are folding it into the main product. This not only lets you view Twitters in different ways, but it introduces new use cases as well. One of my favorites is what happened a few months ago when there was a gas shortage in Atlanta. Some users figured out that they would Twitter when they found gas, where it was, and how much it cost, then append the keyword #ATLgas, which let other people search for that and find gas themselves. This trend of people using this communication network to help each other out goes far beyond the original idea of just keeping up with family and friends and has happened more and more lately. Whether it's raising money for homeless people, or to dig wells in Africa, or for a family in crisis, people have raised tens of thousands of dollars over Twitter in a matter of days on several occasions. It seems like when you give people easier ways to share information, more good things happen. I have no idea what will happen next with Twitter, but I've learned to follow the hunch but never assume where it will go.