Evan Williams describes himself as "an American entrepreneur, originally a farm boy from Nebraska, who's been very lucky in business and life." This statement might be true if he was merely responsible for one giant leap in the Web 2.0 world. However, as someone partly responsible for two monumental jumps forward, one has to conclude that he's being over-modest by attributing his success to luck rather than his capacity for vision, tenacity and good judgment.
In 1999, Pyra Labs, a company Williams co-founded, launched Blogger, a web-based service that put easy to use blog publishing tools in the hands of the masses and helped fuel the proliferation of the web log phenomenon. The company was sold to Google for an undisclosed sum in 2003. Williams however had caught the start-up bug, and left Google the following year to co-found Odeo.com, an aggregator and search engine for podcasts. The Odeo concept never really took off, but a side project started at the company did. The original five-character SMS shortcode-friendly name for that venture was Twttr.
Odeo was reorganized and re-branded as Obvious Corp. in 2006, and Twitter, which had added a couple of vowels to its name, became the center of attention. After winning SXSW's Web Award in March 2007, Twitter was spun off as an entity unto itself. Since then, Twitter has grown exponentially, with usership increasing by 900% this past year. The site has leapt over giants like LiveJournal and Linkedin in terms of monthly visits, rising from #22 (in Jan '08) to #3 (in Jan '09) in Compete.com's list of the Top 25 Social Networks.
Unlike other, increasingly cumbersome, social networking sites, Twitter's success lies in its simplicity. It has stayed true to its original concept: delivering brief Facebook style status updates to social groups in real-time via SMS. The service, which can also be accessed via RSS and the web, combats our propensity for digital diarrhea (which was, ironically, enabled by the likes of Blogger), by asking one simple question and limiting posts in response to 140 cellphone-friendly characters.
We tracked down Evan Williams (Twitter's CEO as of October 2008) -- via Twitter of course -- to ask him about the rules he tweets by, the people he follows, and his vision for the service's future.
Click HERE to read full interview at SuicideGirls.com.
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