Hatching Twitter Part 4

Technically, this wasn't the first status update. Before the hack day, Ev had decided to build his own crude version of Twitter using some old Blogger code and his personal EvHead blog. He called his experiment a "Twitlog," and although it was a rudimentary version of the concept, it gave him a glimpse into what a Twitter-like experience would be. For his first update he wrote, "setting up my twitlog," a few minutes later adding, "hmmm ... will it work?" He then spent the next few days updating pithy Twitlogs from his phone. "Eating a vegan peanut b.u.t.ter cookie. Mmm." "Wis.h.i.+ng Sara was here." "Walking to work." "Eating a vegan burger in Salt Lake airport."

While employees watched Ev's Twitlog experiment to see if these updates were interesting, Jack and Biz dove in headfirst on the real Twitter, Florian building the back end of the site, Jack working on the front end, and Biz designing the look and feel. Noah set out to oversee the development of a Twttr logo, which, after days of trivial iterations, ended up looking like a hideous green blob of goo. Jeremy, Blaine, and Tim helped with code problems when needed.

To keep the site simple and clean, Jack's original status concept had envisioned that, as with instant messenger, people would have only one status message visible at a time. If a person updated their status, the previous update would vanish forever and be replaced with the new Twitter message. But Ev had argued that like blogs, status updates should be in a stream format, showing up chronologically. After Noah spent a few days following Ev's Twitlog, he also suggested adding a time stamp to each update so people would know when it had been posted.

For several days Noah, Biz, Jack, and Florian worked away. There were bugs. Problems. Roadblocks. Things were digitally taped together, held in place with makes.h.i.+ft snippets of code. Then finally, two weeks later, Jack sent what would be the first official Twitter update. On March 21, 2006, at 11:50 A.M., Jack tweeted, "just setting up my twttr," like the first message Ev had sent on his Twitlog a few days earlier.

And with this collaboration, it all started to come together. Jack's concept of people sharing their status updates; Ev's and Biz's suggestion to make sure updates flowed into a stream, similar to Blogger; Noah adding timestamps, coming up with the name, and verbalizing how to humanize status by "connecting" people; and finally, friends.h.i.+ps and the idea of sharing with groups that had percolated out of Odeo and all the people who had worked there.

Biz was working from home in Berkeley that day. But he was on instant messenger and saw the words "just setting up my twttr" appear on his cell phone. He quickly messaged Jack. "Just got your status on my phone!" he said, then, giving a nod to Alexander Graham Bell when he demonstrated the telephone for the first time in 1876, Biz wrote: "Watson, come in here please!" They started talking on instant messenger: Jack: Nice! Update yours. I'm following Biz: Hey, that makes me think of a good tagline for twitter "do you follow me?"

Then Biz signed up and sent his first tweet: "just setting up my twttr."

"Got it!" Jack replied. Then nine minutes later, it was Noah's turn: "just setting up my twttr." Then Crystal and Jeremy thirty seconds later. Then Tony Stubblebine, another senior Odeo engineer. Florian. Ev. And the other employees started to follow along.

Jack tweeted again: "Inviting coworkers." Biz: "Getting my odeo folks on this deal." Dom joined. Rabble. As everyone peered at their phones and computers trying to decide what to type, Dom excitedly tweeted, "oooooooh," followed by Jeremy: "Oh s.h.i.+t, I just twittered a little."

Each update was followed by a chorus of other phones vibrating as everyone simultaneously felt the messages. Tim Roberts joined. "Oh this is going to be addictive," Dom wrote. "Wis.h.i.+ng I had another sammich," Biz wrote. "Lunch," Jack typed. "checking out twttr," Ev said. "Oh man, this twitter tickles my nose," Jeremy said.

And that was it. A spark of life. Tweets.

"using twttr.com," Biz wrote as he continued to test the site. The first version of the Web site was crude and simple. "What's your status?" sat at the top with a rectangular box below, then an "update" b.u.t.ton that allowed people to share their status. Like a blog, a stream of updates flowed below.

Jack left the office at around six o'clock that evening, walking over to his evening drawing cla.s.s, excited that Twitter was working, and announced that he was "Drawing naked people." Then for the following few hours they were like a bunch of children at a sleepover wis.h.i.+ng each other good night. Like a group of friends talking about what they had done that evening, they all sat separately, together, having a conversation. Tweeting.

Adam: "pumping iron."

Noah: "Oh c.r.a.p, I think I might be getting that f'in cold."

Jeremy: "fantasizing about jack drawing naked people mmmmmmmmmmmmm ... naked people."

Dom: "Heading home."

Jack: "sleep."

Ev: "wondering if updates are working."

Ev: "happy that they are."

Biz: "having some coffee."

Tony: "thinking about polyphasic sleep."

Noah: "biz wont leave me alone."

Crystal: "Aerobics Supah Star."

Jack: "n bd readn, wrtng txt spk."

Biz: "accessing twttr on my treo web browser."

Jack: "sleep."

Noah: "late night at the office. missed lost :-("

Crystal: "cleaned the bathroom, ate a salad, going to bed soon!"

Noah: "bed time for me. goodnight."

The Cowboy at the Rodeo.

It was late in the evening when the door to the Odeo offices burst open and Noah stumbled in, drunk.

"Jack!" he bellowed across the room, barreling toward him with the elation of a child just home from school but with the pungent smell of a drunk. Jack slipped his headphones off and looked up with a tired expression. "Hey, Noah."

"I might have just f.u.c.ked up," Noah said, clapping his hands in the air and dropping into a chair next to Jack. "You guys might be kinda p.i.s.sed at me."

"What'd you do?" Jack asked, unsure how this particular Noah production would play out.

"I think I just announced Twitter to the media," Noah said, spiraling into a ramble about this great party, Om Malik, cigarettes, free drinks, and a mechanical bull.

It was mid-July 2006, and the Valley had the feel of an amus.e.m.e.nt park that had just reopened for business. Exciting new social rides were being built on the plots that had once belonged to pet-food Web sites and other pedestrian ideas from the late nineties. And now admission was free. You simply paid in privacy by giving up your personal information for access.

The new Valley had a new name too. Web 2.0! New and improved: the social Web. Mys.p.a.ce and Friendster were the chatter of the late-teen world, and this nascent thing called Facebook was spreading around college dorm rooms with the velocity of a common cold. Flickr, the social photo site, had recently been purchased by Yahoo! for almost forty million dollars, a small gold mine in those days.

Like children mesmerized by an enigmatic snow globe, people outside the Valley were once again peering in, wondering how they could become part of this wonderland, how they could own a snow globe that, if shaken properly, would send not snowflakes but money fluttering down to land neatly in their hands.

But among the boundless wealth beginning to swirl around the Valley there was also a slew of broken start-ups, like Odeo, that were going out of business. Which is how Noah had ended up drunk at a party, extolling himself as one of the creators of Twitter.

A couple of Valley entrepreneurs with a witty sense of humor about the roller-coaster mentality of the tech scene decided to capitalize on the demise of these start-ups and started a monthly club called "Valleyschwag," where people would pay a twenty dollars a month to receive a bag of random swag. Each month's goodies, wrapped in brown burlap, included T-s.h.i.+rts, stickers, pens, and mouse pads from the companies that were about to disappear in an elaborate magic trick of their own making.

To help commemorate these dying companies, there was a party called the "Valleyschwag Hoedown." Earlier in the day, before the festivities began, the Valleyschwag organizers needed more junk to hand out at the hoedown. It was no secret that Odeo was dying, so one schwag organizer stopped at its offices, where Ev led him into a closet filled with gray T-s.h.i.+rts with pink Odeo logos. "Can I take some for the party?" the organizer asked.

"Sure," Ev replied in a chagrinned tone. "Take as many as you want."

As the hoedown got under way, bales of hay sat in the corner of the room and Noah arrived, gleeful about Twitter, a product that until that evening very few people knew about. After swigging shots of vodka with well-knowns from the tech scene, eating a dry piece of hoedown cake, dancing with girls in cowboy hats, and riding the rented mechanical bull with a cardboard horse head taped to the front, Noah found himself standing outside, drunk and smoking cigarettes with Om Malik, a blogger who covered the tech scene. They leaned up against a large yellow school bus called "Lola" that had been brought in for the party.

Noah, unable to contain himself, took a few manic drags of his cigarette and excitedly told Om everything about the new site. "It came out of a chat in my car on Valencia and Fourteenth after a night of heavy vodka drinking," he slurred. "Give me your phone. I'll sign you up!" Noah said, a cigarette now hanging from his mouth like James Dean. He pressed a few b.u.t.tons, then handed the phone back, briefly explaining how Twitter worked.

"Looking 4 food," Om tweeted, then inhaled a last puff of smoke and stuffed his phone back in his pocket.

After pulling the cat out of the bag by its tail, Noah decided it would be best to sign others up too, and he turned into a traveling salesman at the hoedown. "Give me your phone! I'll sign you up!" he yelled to people over the sound of country music. Before he knew it, he was standing there, drunk, in the middle of the hoedown, people swirling around him in cowboy hats, a tiny ocean of alcohol in his little plastic cup. He soon realized he should tell Jack and the others back at the office about his impromptu media conference.

Noah's excitement about Twitter had been palpable for weeks. A few days earlier the Odeo board members had arrived in the office to attend a quarterly board meeting and hear updates about potentially selling the podcasting service. But before the meeting began, Noah and Ev wanted to demo Twitter to the investors. Jack came into the conference room for the show-and-tell, which was his first time attending a board meeting, and sat dead silent as Noah gave an impa.s.sioned demonstration of Twitter.

"What do you think?" Noah asked George Zachary, the lead Odeo investor, after his demonstration. "It's amazing, right? It can allow you to connect with your friends!"

George stared at Noah with a confused look, quietly wondering to himself why anyone would want to "connect with their friends" when those friends were sitting right there. He thought the group of programmers had smoked something before the meeting and looked around uncertainly. Still, Noah continued with animated examples of Twitter's ability to connect people.

A few days later, when Noah stumbled in from the hoedown and announced that he had told the blogosphere, Jack acknowledged that it wasn't a big deal, brushed it off, and got back to work. Like Ev, Jack was grossly averse to conflict, at least the kind that happened in plain sight.

Secretly, Jack was furious.

His friends.h.i.+p with Noah had already started to wane after a recent discussion about Crystal.

Over the past year, Noah, Jack, and Crystal had become best friends, eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner together several times a week, drinking excessively at night, and on weekends dancing late into the morning. In April they had all set out with some friends to Coach.e.l.la, a ma.s.sive music festival seven hours south of San Francisco. They danced in the desert to the Chemical Brothers, Girl Talk, and Imogen Heap and slept next to one another in the desert. But Noah had noticed Jack's increased attention towards Crystal as he followed her around the concert like a security guard.

One evening Noah pulled Jack aside and told him the infatuation with Crystal was unhealthy and he should "chill" a bit. Jack became defensive and accused Noah of trying to push Jack aside so he could be with Crystal instead. "Huh? I love Crystal, but I don't want to date her," Noah protested, a look of total bewilderment on his face. But Jack's mind was already made up.

Now, as Noah sat in the office, drunkenly describing how he had signed people up for Twitter and pulled back the curtains on the top-secret project, Jack was again upset that Noah was meddling. First Crystal, now Twitter. Jack's feelings toward Noah were turning from love to disdain.

And he wasn't alone.

The following morning the Odeo and Twitter employees came in to work to discover a handful of blog posts discussing this new strange thing called Twitter.

Mike Arrington, who ran TechCrunch, a popular Valley tech blog, wrote that Twitter had launched officially and "a few select insiders were playing with the service at the Valleyschwag party in San Francisco last night." But Arrington didn't seem too impressed by the new service. He questioned its privacy issues and, in a direct slam to Ev, wondered why Odeo, a podcasting company, was wasting its time on side projects.

Although Om Malik's blog post was kinder, showing interest in the new Twitter contraption, he gave all the credit to a certain drunk cofounder he had shared cigarettes and vodka with the night before. "A new mobile social networking application written by Noah Gla.s.s (and team)," Om wrote.

Ev tried to fix the press afterward, but it was too late. And although Noah didn't know it yet, his drunken media announcements were about to have serious consequences.

The Green Benches.

South Park was eerily still and quiet in the dark. There were no children playing on the swing sets. The green park benches were empty. The lights of the matchbox-shaped buildings that surround the park were all off, their cafes, restaurants, and offices long since closed for the day. The sole exception was number 164, where a dim yellow glow whispered through the cubed windows that faced the street.

Inside, the clocks on the walls swept silently past midnight. Yet in the rear of the building, past the empty desks with darkened computer monitors, was Noah, doing what he now did on most nights. Sitting alone.

It had become an evening routine. Some nights he cried while painting large, elaborate murals. Other times he played music, rattling his fingers against the strings of his guitar while he sang melancholy music. He often sang about love into his webcam, a dark-brimmed hat covering his welled-up eyes.

His marriage was essentially over; his start-up, Odeo, a decomposing corpse. His relations.h.i.+p with his closest friends, who were also his coworkers, was in complete tatters too.

So Noah did what Noah did best. He turned to the magical Internet in search of solace. He talked to his webcam. His blog. And, of course, Twitter.

He was using Twitter for exactly what he had hoped it might be used for: curing loneliness. Noah had understood the concept well before everyone else had. "It can be whatever you want it to be," he had written on his blog a few days earlier. "The fact that I could find out what my friends were doing at any moment of the day made me feel closer to them and, quite honestly, a little less alone." Sadly, of course, his hypothesis had proven false and his sadness wasn't being lessened by friends far away. Which was why he had been spending night after night solitarily hiding in the back of the office, unwanted.

His state of affairs was mostly his own doing.

In early June, Crystal had started helping with Twitter, adding her support prowess and answering questions from early testers of the site. Although it was still secret at the time, employees were allowed to give out private invites to close friends and family.

At around lunchtime on July 5, Dennis Crowley, a well-known entrepreneur who ran Dodgeball, which had recently been acquired by Google, e-mailed Twitter asking if he could join. Crystal, unaware of who Dennis was, happily responded with a code that activated his account. Moments later, when Noah saw Dennis's name stream across his computer monitor with the usual first tweet, "just setting up my twttr," Noah became enraged, storming out of his office like a wrestler into a ring.

"What the f.u.c.k is going on?" he bellowed as everyone's head's snapped around, startled. "Why the f.u.c.k did we approve Dennis Crowley's account?!"

"I don't know who he is ...," Crystal said, a timid look of shock and fear in her eyes as she stared back at Noah.

Noah tore into a rampage. "You have no idea what you've just f.u.c.king done," he yelled, pacing erratically. Crystal burst into tears.

"Calm down, Noah," employees said to him. "You're overreacting. It's not that big of a deal."

"This is f.u.c.king war!" Noah yelled as Jack also tried unsuccessfully to pacify him. "This is f.u.c.king war! This is our enemy. We need a war map. They're going to attack us; we need to destroy them."

Everyone tried again to mollify Noah, but he continued yelling, a panic saturating him as he eventually stormed back into his office.

A few days later he had another outburst, sending an almost frantic e-mail to George Zachary, an investor in the company and a member of the Odeo board: "I would like to talk with you about twttr," Noah wrote in the e-mail. "It is important that I speak to you as soon as possible." Noah had been arguing that Twitter should be spun out as its own company and he should be the CEO. Technically, what happened to Twitter was up to the investors who had originally financed Odeo, as they were now unintentionally paying for the development of this experiment.

Ev hadn't originally been against the idea. He knew Noah had given everything to the new project. Two months earlier, in May 2006, Ev had even e-mailed the Odeo board suggesting that they spin Twitter out into its own company with Noah at the helm: "Why not set up Twttr, Inc. as a separate company-perhaps not wholly owned, but mirrored owners.h.i.+p, seed it with $500k or so and let Noah see what he can do," Ev had written enthusiastically. But the board was not interested in Twitter; if Ev and Noah didn't want to continue with Odeo, the investors wanted to sell it to the highest bidder and get their money back. They saw the side project as just another Ev distraction.

"Ev, we are going to have a disaster situation occur shortly if we slow down selling the company," George Zachary had responded. "My patience is really getting pushed here and I am close to out of it."

Now, as the discussion was being raised again about spinning out Twitter, Noah's erratic and manic behavior had slowly chipped away at the prospect of his running it-or even Odeo.

Noah was also becoming paranoid about Ev. On more than one occasion he solemnly pulled Jack aside and confessed his fears. "Ev's trying to push me out of the company. I can feel it. We should get out of here and start our own thing," he whispered to Jack. "We should go off and start our own Twitter."

But Jack knew what was going to happen next and told Noah to stay put and see how things unfolded before doing anything. "Wait," Jack said. "Don't do anything yet. Let's just wait."

"But Ev is trying to kick me out of the company," Noah replied.

Noah's hunch was only half-correct: It wasn't just Ev who wanted to kick Noah out of the company. It was everyone else too.

Twitter was barely a newborn at the time, but there was already squabbling over who had fed it, who had let others go near it. For a while the entire site had existed solely on Noah's IBM laptop. Then Jack had taken charge of the engineering side of Twitter and, each morning, a.s.signed programming tasks to Florian, who was now working remotely from Germany. But late at night, while Noah was sitting alone in his office catching ideas that were falling out of the dark, brief stints of pa.s.sion amid his depressed state, he was also telling Florian what to work on. Jack would arrive in the office the next morning to find a list of tasks completed, but not his list: Noah's.

Ev was torn over what to do about Noah's outbursts and media hijacking. Jack helped him decide. One afternoon Jack asked Ev if they could talk privately. "You can't tell Noah about this conversation," Jack said. They were, after all, still "friends." Jack said that Noah was interfering with Twitter, that he couldn't work with him anymore, and that Jack was thinking about quitting. When Ev asked where he would go, he proclaimed that he would happily leave and go into the fas.h.i.+on industry. Then Jack threw down the gauntlet: "If Noah stays, I'm going to leave. I can't work with him anymore."

For Ev the answer was simple. He knew Noah's life was falling apart, but he also saw that he was scrambling to hold onto anything tangible as he fell, and he risked taking the dying Odeo and the newborn Twitter with him.

So after conferring with the board, at around 6:00 P.M. on Wednesday, July 26, Ev and Noah walked outside to the park benches. Noah knew exactly what was going to happen next. The park benches were an Ev tell.

Although Ev's gut told him Twitter was going to be something, at the time it was still just a side project. Odeo, on the other hand, was dead on arrival. As a result, Ev had started laying people off over the past months.

Layoffs always followed the same pattern. At this point Ev had it down to a science: He would walk over, tap someone on the shoulder, and quietly say, "Hey, let's go for a walk." He'd said it to Rabble, Dom, and a few others on separate occasions. His hands were often half in his pockets, his elbows slightly bent. He would slowly move his head at an angle, back and slightly to the right, to motion toward the door.

Together they'd walk out of the building and cut left, taking the few brief steps to South Park. There they would sit on a green park bench and Ev would deliver his eulogy.

"Things have been rough at Odeo lately," he would say. A sort of "It's not you, it's me" breakup. Some people cried; some felt relieved. (Rabble had been elated when he was let go by the Man.) But there was one person who was angry.

"I won't f.u.c.king leave," Noah barked at Ev as they sat on a bench. Noah then spun into a tirade about Odeo and about Ev's rarely being present at the company, about Noah's overseeing Twitter, nurturing it, feeding it, helping realize its ideas along with everyone else.