Introducing Twitter, “..The Dumbest Thing Ever”
Doing research for the Techcrunch story (Michael Arrington liked that post), I unintentionally found a real gem - Techcrunch introduction of a new web 2.0 service - Twttr (the original name, they later changed it to Twitter). The service was a side-project of the Odeo team, a startup that created a podcast search engine.
It’s truly amazing to see, in retrospect, how far an idea, which very few people could initially understand, can go. Even Michael (TC) lacked the foresight to identify the real strength of the service - people sharing trivial daily activities publicly. . He says:
There is also a privacy issue with Twttr. Every user has a public page that shows all of their messages. Messages from that person’s extended network are also public. I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website.
There are some very interesting (and somewhat funny) comments on that post:
I do not understand the utility of adding the SMS messages to a public webpage or making messages from my network public. I would have to pass on that type of offering. The ability to make messages private should be added asap.
i do not want to be woken up at 4 a.m. because my friend got drunk and decided to text Twttr with “asdl im at barasdf sooo drunksalkfjs”
I think this is the dumbest thing ever! Who would want all their personal text messages on a public website for anyone to read and track?
Odeo was a failure from the get go. No revenue model. I asked their VC - CRV - what the revenue model was a year ago and he said “to sell to someone bigger.” Okay, that was a web 1.0 answer, and now we get Twttr - an even dumber idea with no revenue model, but a 2.0 concept
Not innovative and not focused. Twttr sounds like a disaster in the making
You’d have to agree that some of these comments are still relevant, despite Twitter’s amazing success.
You can read the original post here.
One of Twitter’s first homepage designs - go get a barf bag. It’s ugly!
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