as important, the site also lets its users track what people are saying in their posts, what new jobs they get, and much more. And that's just smart business, and social.
Yammer
Microblogging services thrive most when they ask users to answer a simple question and allow anyone to see the answer. Yammer (www.yammer.com) keeps to those roots but narrows the focus of the question – and the audience, too. (See Figure 1.7.)
Figure 1.7 Yammer's restrictions make Twitter look like a free-for-all.
Instead of inviting people to share what they're doing (and receiving answers that might range from saving an oil-soaked bird to eating an avocado sandwich), it asks users to explain what they're working on.
But it reveals those answers only to people on the network with the same corporate e-mail address, making it what geeks would call an intranet system, which makes it a useful tool for communicating within a business, but not so useful for marketing of any sort.
And finally, we come to Twitter – the site that has really set the standard in microblogging. Twitter, originally called twttr, was founded by programmers Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass in July 2006.
Williams was a serial entrepreneur who had founded a company called Pyra Labs that made project management software. A note-taking feature on that software went on to become Blogger, the free blogging service later bought by Google. In fact, some people credit Williams with coining the word blogger to describe people who write Weblogs.
In 2004, Williams left Google to form podcasting company Odeo, and two years later, he created Obvious with Stone, a programmer who had joined Blogger after its acquisition by the search engine giant. The new company bought Odeo, which it later sold to a company called Sonic Mountain. Round and round. It's a game of musical chairs that makes our heads swim, too.
The important thing is that Odeo launched and then began to focus exclusively on a simple chat application called Twitter.
The original idea for Twitter came from Dorsey, an Odeo employee. In an interview for ReadWriteTalk.com Stone described the moment when they first discussed the idea:
A few of us were thinking about what are some interesting ways that maybe we can merge SMS [short message service] to the Web,” he said. “[Dorsey] had come up with this idea where if you just look at only the status field of an instant message application like AIM, and you just look at that as a sort of really small version of what people are already doing…and you just make it super simple, ‘Here's what I'm doing.’…[W]e kind of went off in a corner and we worked for two weeks and we created a prototype. We showed the rest of the team and everyone just sort of giggled. They all kind of loved it. It was really fun. We used it over the weekend. We found it very compelling and we decided that we would keep working on it.
That was in March 2006, and initially Twitter was used by the company's employees as a fun form of internal communication. (Tech companies, it seems, might have lava lamps and pinball machines, but they never seem to have watercoolers!)
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
