Biz Stone is back at SXSW for the first time since Twitter blew up there in 2007. In the first of a series of stories he tells is about the birth of Twitter. Twitter wasn’t conveived as a channel for serious communication, it was meant to be fun and social. In the prototype stage, one of the first things Evan Williams tweeted (before the real tweets began to flow) was “Sipping Pinot Noir after a massage in Napa valley”.
By 2007 there were about 5000 twitter users and they “were all the dorks that go to SXSW”. It gave them the “South-West bump” and after that there was seldom a major world event that didn’t feature Twitter. When Biz was called by a journalist and asked about his involvement in a student uprising in Moldova he had to look up Moldova to find out where it was.
The remaining stories cover creativity, being prepared to fail, illustrated with reference to Wim Wenders ‘Wings of Desire’ and the compound value of doing good. Whilst the stories that Biz tells are only loosely connected, they are linked by a theme that links the future of marketing and corporate success to philanthropy. Its his philosophy for business and he walks the talk. Twitter had a CSR person years before it had a sales person.
I’ve just passed the 500 mark on LinkedIn and it feels wrong. Let me explain. I can’t possible know 500 people. I’m fascinated and largely persuaded by the work of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar.
It began with a conversation in the Blackdog Ballroom with Dom Burch. He is about to take a six month sabbatical from his role as Head of Corporate Communications at ASDA and he has a new twitter profile to mark the occasion. I then saw on twitter that the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg is moving to ITV and will therefore cease to be @BBCLauraK; re-emerging in the autumn as @ITVLauraK.
Lady Gaga is the first entity to gain 10 million followers on Twitter. Although teen idol Justin Bieber is gaining followers at a faster rate, 23,000 a day against Gaga’s measly 22,000, he still has around 300k to go before he crosses the line.
Amidst all of the buzz around Twitter’s $50 million bid for Tweetdeck, a new app for the iPhone is launched today. To date the iPhone version has been something of a compromise; a big box solution squeezed into the narrower confines of a handheld device.
It began in earnest with Trafigura but the freedom to publish now means that the superinjuction, a form of gagging order in which the press is prohibited from reporting even the existence of the injunction, or any details of it, is now almost impossible to enforce.
