St. Louis had a collective Twittergasm this morning as Twitter co-founder and St. Louis native Jack Dorsey kicked off Webster University’s speaker series.
There was much love for St. Louis, and we all bathed in the glow of this relative spotlight, as the speech at least briefly became a trending topic on Twitter.
An interesting theme of the talk was that Twitter was an information network, and not a social network. Mr. Dorsey repeatedly referred to Twitter as a utility, kind of a framework for communication.
He also spoke of a patient approach in terms of the Twitter business model, comparing it to Google, and how Google took 5 years to generate revenue, trying new ideas and in effect, letting the business model reveal itself rather than try to force one on the company.
The biggest news from the speech was that Mr. Dorsey’s as yet un-announced next company was coming soon, and that St. Louis would be playing a prominent role in it.
Some interesting tidbits and behind the scenes information was revealed, including the origin of the name Twitter, which was derived from the word Twitch and is defined as follows: ” a short, inconsequential burst of information. Chirps from birds”.
We also learned that the terms “tweet” and “retweet”, the @ symbol and # symbol were invented by users, not by the folks at Twitter, and in fact, some of those terms and symbols faced vehement objections from the folks inside Twitter.
As soon as the speech is archived on the internet somewhere, we will link you to it. Please add your thoughts in the comments.
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I was there and really enjoyed it. It truly appears as though the public can influence the direction of Twitter such as when Jack said that “RT”, “@”, and “tweet” came from the users and was then incorporated into their programming. I also found it interesting that they originally thought Twitter would be great for junior high school age kids, and didn't realize that it would be embraced by 20-50 year old geeks first.
I am excited to see what is in the works for him and STL. The region should be proud of its son.
Sandy, I agree.
For all the publicity Twitter gets, you don't see much about the St. Louis
connection. And Jack himself clearly seems proud of it, so I hope that we
hear a little more about it going forward.