Twitter was the result of the failure of a podcast related startup “Odeo”…had Odeo succeeded we’d have ended up with a cool podcast app and no Twitter
Odeo, 2005
In late 2005 Michael Arrington wrote an article titled “Odeo Disappoints“, reviewing Odeo which opened with “My patience with Odeo has run out.”. Running out of money and out of business because of iTunes incorporating podcasts functionality the people behind Odeo as a last resource they assembled a team that has one function finding an alternative product to adopt, and out of that team came Twitter.
Twitter!
At first it was running from one of the team members laptop! with a couple of thousand users, even then they were able to tell how addictive it is. One of the cofounders recounts how their SMS GW contacted them surprised by the size of traffic this app is generating.
Twitter running on a laptop
At that point no one imagined its going to end up being what it is now, the ubiquitous conscious stream of the world.
