Twitter almost never took off in the beginning because doubters urged co-founder Biz Stone to give up on the fledgling social media site, Stone told Ball State students Friday.
Stone said he resisted because he knew the simple joy of using Twitter would be a success.
"The Early critique of Twitter was it's not useful," he said. "Ev's [Williams, Twitter's other co-founder] response was, ‘Neither is ice cream. Do you want us to abandon that and all joy?'"
Stone spoke of Twitter's rocky start, its evolution and the uncertain future during a forum with about 30 students this afternoon.
"A Conversation with David Letterman and Biz Stone" was scheduled for Friday night at John R. Emens Auditorium. Overflow seating is available at Pruis Hall for a closed-circuit TV feed.
Stone's success with social media began with a bookmarking and book review site, the early version of Xanga, which developed into a platform for blogging.
A short stint at Google laid the foundation for his partnership with Williams, and the team then developed one of the first podcast companies, Odeo. An engineer at the company offered the idea of posting status updates, which fed into the idea for Twitter. At the time of its conception, the service still had no permanent name.
Twitter really got its start at the music-, film- and interactive-festival South by Southwest in 2007.
"We were seeing all these people just get up and leave [from one of the lectures], almost as if some invisible voice had told them to do so," Stone said.
He later realized people were using Twitter to invite others to a different session down the hall. Convention-goers used Twitter later that night to get the word out about what bar they were meeting at.
"[The bar was] totally filled to capacity," he said. "There's a line out the door."
That was when they realized that humans can actually flock like animals, and social networking is the medium that can set it in motion.
"The image that came to my mind," he said, "was that of a flock of birds, something that looks incredibly choreographed and beautiful and complicated."
That night, he and Williams decided on the name Twitter.
Earlier:
A conversation with David Letterman and Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter, is taking place just days after the social media site announced its redesign plans to become more like Facebook with embedded photos and videos as well as mini-profiles for users.
The company's chief operating officer, Dick Costolo, gave a keynote address Thursday to about 2,000 people at the Marriott Downtown Indianapolis, saying these changes should benefit advertisers and businesses.
During his speech, Twitter was buzzing. That might be the same story here on campus. Friday afternoon, nearly half of responders to a Daily News poll said if they could ask Stone one question, they would ask if he found it inappropriate to tweet while he's talking.
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