Twitter turns seven today : Changed the world of so many people vc
Twitter is seven years old today.
It’s come an awful long way since most people, including 99.99% of lawyers, thought Twitter the silliest thing in the world.
After all, how often could you say your cat just rolled over? And I don’t even like cats. Or how often could you tweet I just had a grilled cheese for lunch? And I only eat those on Saturday when no one is Twitter.
No question I was a skeptic. 8,124,952 people registered as Twitter users before I became the 8,124,953’rd user of Twitter in August, 2007 (see your number and when you joined on Tweetbot).Tony Hsieh (@zappos), CEO of Zappos, turned me onto Twitter as something worth my while. I was speaking on blogging at a conference for the Fortune 200 in Las Vegas. This, before anyone coined the term social media.
Speakers from United Airlines and Wells Fargo were talking about Twitter as a customer service tool. I thought, other than talking about Twitter as useful, these people were pretty smart.
But then Hsieh spoke about Twitter in a way that I believed he was talking about Twitter for building relationships. Business relationships from Twitter? That piqued my interest to explore more.
Following a number of CEO’s and business leaders on Twitter I realized they were sharing news and information they picked up and read from their RSS readers. Doing so they enhanced their reputation as an authority in the area on which they were sharing information.
Secondly, they were meeting the people who followed them on Twitter and the people who authored/reported the information they shared. Relationships.
I started using Twitter the same way as those business leaders. Overtime, Twitter did more to enhance my reputation and build relationships than any medium I used — by far.
Twitter has become part of the fabric of my life. For that I am grateful to their founders, Jack Dorsey @Jack), Biz Stone (@biz) and Ev Williams (@Ev), and Dick Costello (@dickc), their CEO.
Who would have thunk the silly thing with the silly name would have ten times the news distribution power of the AP, UPI, and Reuters combined in just seven years? Then you add relationships.
Twitter’s been a well run company. Pour your money into design, development, and servers so as improve the user’s experience, then worry about revenue. Discussion is that Twitter will do $1 Billion in ad revenue this year. Rather than an early IPO, focus on building a business.
All good stuff. Here’s to another seven great years together.