From twwtr to twitter

Pyra Labs is the company that coined the word Blogger, and made the service a big success.

The co-founders were Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan, and the company's first product, also named 'Pyra', was a web application which would combine a project manager, contact manager, and to-do list. In 1999, while still in beta, the rudiments of Pyra were repurposed into an in-house tool which became Blogger. The service was made available to the public in August 1999. Much of this coding was done by Paul Bausch and Matthew Haughey.
2000. Initially, Blogger was completely free and there was no revenue model. When the company's seed money dried up, the employees continued without pay for weeks or, in some cases, months; but this could not last, and eventually Williams faced a mass walk-out by everyone including co-founder Hourihan. Williams ran the company virtually alone until he was able to secure an investment by Trellix after its founder Dan Bricklin became aware of Pyra's situation. Eventually advertising-supported blogspot and Blogger Pro emerged.
In 2002, Blogger was completely re-written in order to license it to other companies, the first of which was Globo of Brazil.
The company was acquired by Google in 2003. The people at Pyra Labs at the time of acquisition were Evan Williams, Jason Shellen, Steve Jenson, Jason Sutter, and Rudy Winnacker and jason goldman.
In 2004, Williams left Google, later going on to form obvious corp . In 2006, goldman also left Google. Hourihan was associated with Kinja and some other sites.
Obvious became odeo and twitter was created by jack dorsey of odeo. Odeo lost out to itunes and williams dorsey and stone bought obvious and twitter


Tuesday 18 February 2003
Google, the world's most-used internet search engine, yesterday announced the acquisition of Blogger, a web service which has fuelled the rapid rise of the web journals popularly known as weblogs.
Pyra Labs, the company behind Blogger, was sold to Google for an undisclosed sum on Saturday after four months of negotiations.
Weblogs, once the preserve of a technologically savvy elite, have gained popularity since the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001. The websites, which mostly serve niche audiences, typically contain frequently updated opinion and links to material around the internet. Blogger is behind more than 1m weblogs, 200,000 of which are active.
The sale is being seen by many in the online community as a sign weblogs have become a mainstream medium. Evan Williams, Pyra's chief executive, said last night he was very happy about the deal which has transferred him and Blogger's six staff to Google.
He said: "There is not a great deal I can talk about at the moment.We are all still trying to figure it out." Earlier, on his Evhead.com weblog, he described the purchase as "an awesome opportunity".
The sale is a dramatic turnaround for San Francisco-based Blogger, which rode the high and subsequent low of the dotcom boom. The company was founded in 1999, and Mr Williams had to lay off the company's entire staff in late 2000. He continued to maintain the service by himself from his home until last year, when he increased revenues by starting a premium version.


A blueprint sketch, circa 2006, by Jack Dorsey, envisioning an SMS-based social network

Now $160m invested
Google and Bing deals $25m …real time news

Twttr is a new mobile service that helps groups of friends bounce random thoughts around with SMS. When we showed it to Jason Goldman (product manager of Blogger) he called it "present tense blogging." That's a great way to describe it. It's fun to use because it strips social blogging down to it's essence and makes it immediate.

Jack Dorsey is one of Odeo's brightest stars so when he told us about this idea that has been haunting him for six years we had to listen. It's not even remotely related to audio but it's an awesome idea so we told him to go for it. Jack put this thing together very quickly but it took a few months to get a short code.

Anywhoo, there are two ways to use twttr: on the phone and on the web. The phone part is entirely text based like an adventure game. In addition to posting to 40404 you can "follow biz" "nudge jack" or "get noah" and other stuff. On the web you can browse through your timeline, post, and do lots of other stuff. I find myself switching between the two interfaces when it suits me. It's good stuff.

As pioneer web publishing tool Blogger turns 8 years, I thought it was appropriate to put this thing I did some years ago in YouTube. I recorded this on march 2000, during a brief conference visit to San Francisco. How different things were back then. And how difficult was to realize what was next to come.

Maybe this could be considered a piece of weblogs history and the internet at large, but I'd rather let you decide that.



promo video draft.