Things A Little Bird Told Me

by Biz Stone

  Embrace your constraints, whether they are creative, physical, economic, or self-imposed. They are provocative. They are challenging. They wake you up. They make you more creative. They make you better.

  My favorite artist is the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. He uses exclusively natural materials to make site-specific sculptures, usually out in the wild. Each piece is an impossibly difficult, arduous task, an exercise in endurance. He’ll use his bare hands to break the inch-thick ice off the top of a lake, then will work nonstop to arrange the broken pieces into a sphere bigger than a man. Or he’ll build a snaking stone wall through a forest in Scotland that starts with a tiny pebble and gets increasingly larger as it winds its way, ending with hulking boulders. Or he’ll collect red leaves, tie their stems together, and thread them through the trees. His projects blow away in the wind, melt in the sun, or crumble into dust. Their ephemerality adds to their beauty.

  What do Goldsworthy’s self-imposed constraints say about how we can live our lives? He has so little to work with, and from that simplicity come great peace and beauty. Most lives are filled with too much stuff. What do you really need to make a life? What can you live without? People think of constraint as giving something up instead of gaining something. But if you give away your Xbox, you gain back all the hours it used to suck from your life. Embrace constraint. What you get in return is the art and craft of editing your own life, weeding out what is and isn’t necessary.

  It was the constraint of the two-week hackathon that led to the creation of Twitter. And from day one, the length of a Tweet was always limited, although it didn’t start at 140 characters.

  When we began, we knew that the international text messaging standard limit was 160 characters. This was true for all carriers everywhere—it had to do with bandwidth constraints, or something technical like that. The only reason people don’t talk about the 160-character limit on texts these days is because now the carriers just stitch two texts together if they run over that limit.

  We wanted Twitter to be device agnostic, so that on any crappy mobile phone you could see and write a Tweet, no problem. This meant using the 160-character limit that already existed for texts. At first we gave a user the entire 160 characters, but into that space we automatically inserted a space, a colon, and your username. You got whatever was left.

  One day I raised an issue with Jack. “Wait a minute,” I said. “It’s not fair. Some people get more room to twitter than others, depending on the length of their names.”

  Jack said, “Good point. We should standardize our own thing.” We decided that fifteen characters was about the right amount of space for a username. Then, instead of giving people the remaining 145 characters, we gave them 140. We just picked a number. There was no numerological magic. The standard could just as easily have been 145. It was just simpler to make it 140. The next day, Jack sent out an email to let everyone know that we were standardizing at 140.

  The 140-character limit was an accidental PR hook from the start. It was such a big mystery. Why 140? Was it the number at which people were the most creative? Reporters always joked, “I’m excited to interview you guys. I might have to go over a hundred forty characters.” The novelty of it made for a good icebreaker, but our answers to the question were probably more interesting than the journalists expected. We talked about simplicity, constraint, universal access, and our desire to be device agnostic. It was a good thread to pull.

  Beyond the practical reasons, I believe the limited length of a Tweet contributed to Twitter’s success. From the start, the character length was one of the most hated and loved and talked-about features of Twitter. In the first six months, we saw the advent of Twitter haikus and something people called “twooshes,” updates that used exactly 140 characters. The constraint was inspiring. It lent a consistent rhythm and poetry to the service. And if that weren’t self-limiting enough, in 2006 we partnered with Smith magazine to help it launch its Six-Word Memoir Project on Twitter:

  A character with character limits characters.

  —Biz Stone

  One hundred forty is not a magic number. But imposing a limit brought people together. It was a challenge. You are writing the story of your life. Edit it as you go. In 140 characters, what’s worth saying? How could we express ourselves to each other in this space? How much could be said, and how much would be left unsaid? Twitter was not a place for diatribes or monologues, so what was the point? What’s worth saying? What don’t we need? That provocation made riddlers and poets of all of us.

  In March of 2007, I attended the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference in Austin for the fifth time. Back then the event was primarily known for its movie and music divisions. Interactive, which was my beat, was justa bunch of nerds looking out of place next to the leather-jacketed musicians checking in at every hotel lobby reception desk. It would be a stretch to say that we were the cool kids.

  Still, lots of San Francisco Bay Area geeks attended SXSW to learn about new stuff and meet up with like-minded sorts. There were lectures and panels during the day, but more important was what happened at night. Some startup was always throwing a party. In a weird phenomenon where you had to travel fifteen hundred miles to get a drink with someone whose office was down the block from yours, these parties were great places to meet up with industry colleagues whom you never saw in the Bay Area because you were constantly working.

  That spring there were plenty of people saying that Twitter was stupid and useless. What was the point of software that helped you share the minutiae of your day? But by then there were also about forty-five thousand people signed up and using Twitter. Most of the folks who were active on the service were early adopters, those same Bay Area geeks who love to try out any new technology mostly because it’s new.

  Back at Blogger, we’d always hosted a party at SXSW. But Twitter wasn’t established enough to warrant a party. When we were strategizing our presence, Evan tossed out the idea of creating visual displays in the hallways instead of in the conference room. This was a stroke of brilliance. Traditionally, companies set up booths on the floor of a giant conference room, but we knew from past experience that most of the daytime action at the festival took place in the hallways between the lecture rooms. People congregated there to chat about talks they’d heard, products they’d seen, events their friends were attending, and where the party was that night. They sat down against the walls with their laptops to answer emails and catch up with work.

  We decided we wanted to put up a bunch of big flatscreen monitors in the hallways. We would build a Tweet visualizer, where people attending the festival could watch their SXSW Tweets appear in real time.

  Nobody had ever put displays up in the hallways of the conference before. We went back and forth with the festival organizers, negotiating the use of this space. We had never, ever paid a dime to market Twitter, and this was going to cost us ten thousand dollars—a lot of money for us at the time—but we decided that, for this idea, it was worth ponying up.

  Before we arrived, I designed a visualizer that showed “Twitters”—as we were describing Tweets at the time— drifting through the clouds as if they were birds. We wanted all the Tweets that attendees saw to be about SXSW, but this was before hashtags existed. So we set up a special function. By texting “JoinSXSW” to the number 40404, you opted in to be part of a group of people whose Tweets would appear on the flatscreens.

  To make it more interesting, we invited about twelve top geeks, good Twitter users all, to seed the group—people like Robert Scoble, whose blog, Scobleizer, was hugely popular with our crowd. When you joined the SXSW group, you were automatically following these ideal Twitter ambassadors. We hoped that when they started using Twitter at the festival, other people in the hall would notice their Twitters on the flatscreens and decide that they wanted to follow them and to watch their own updates appear in the hallways for all to see.

  The night before the conference opened, Jack and I had to set up the
flatscreens. Our personal laptops were prepped to run the visualizer, and we had to figure out how to connect them so that their displays showed up on the big plasma monitors placed strategically along the hallway. These were mounted on large, moveable audiovisual units. This is an embarrassing confession for a high-tech mogul, but when it comes to hardware—even something as simple as AV equipment—I’m clueless, so this task was far more difficult than it should have been. Do we use “Input 2” or “Input 3”? How do we make it full screen? The resolution was messed up. Also, our Tweets weren’t appearing.

  By three in the morning we were still working on our displays, and we hadn’t had dinner. I had one measly Odwalla bar with me—the gross, green Superfood one. Jack and I split it.

  At last we worked out the problem. Our Twitter feed was finally up and running on the first of the eight plasma screens, and we knew what we needed to do to make it work on the rest. We decided to come back to the hall early the next morning to finish setting up.

  The next morning, coming off four hours of sleep, Jack and I stumbled back into the hall bright and early, ready to complete the job before the first attendees started arriving. There was just one problem. Twitter was down. Story of our lives.

  Twitter had major issues. In those early days, we crashed so constantly that how often we crashed became a joke. There was even a website to deal with the problem: IsTwitter Down.com.

  Whatever the problem was this time, there was only one person on the planet who could fix it: an engineer on our team who refused to own a cell phone. And he didn’t have a landline, either. We were screwed without him.

  Here we were, exhausted, at the end of our ropes, in the middle of a conference hall. There were poster boards on the walls reading, “text ‘joinsxsw’ to 40404.” People were starting to arrive for the first events of the day. We were trying to configure seven flatscreen connections, kneeling behind the units and fiddling with the cords right out in the open. I was wearing the first shirt that I had designed for Twitter. When we launched Twitter, the home page asked, “What are you doing?” So my company T-shirt read, “Wearing my Twitter shirt.”

  Our engineer was in blissful, phoneless slumber way back in San Francisco, I was wearing my “Wearing my Twitter shirt” shirt, and we looked like idiots.

  Eventually, after a nail-biting couple of hours, we were finally online. The display was exactly what we’d planned. The visualizer was the first thing you noticed when you entered the hall. You could tweet, wait a bit, and then see what you wrote float across all of the screens against the backdrop of animated clouds. The folks at SXSW seemed to “get it.”

  We had accomplished what we came to do. Our ten thousand marketing dollars had been well spent. We could have left then on a high note, but there was more to come.

  On the second day of the conference, I was sitting in a lecture about some aspect of technology. It was a packed auditorium, and I was seated at the back. When I glanced around at the open laptops my fellow attendees were holding, I noticed something. Everyone had twitter.com open. They were all using our website! Wow. The flatscreens and the high-profile Tweeters had done the trick. Twitter had taken hold. This was the first sign that we might be on to something big. It would have been enough.

  Then, not far into the lecture, people suddenly started getting out of their seats to leave the auditorium. It was as if there had been a loudspeaker announcement telling them to do so. There hadn’t been. I checked the time. We still had forty minutes to go. Why was everyone leaving? Had I missed something? It was very strange.

  Only later did I find out that the reason everyone had left was . . . Twitter. There had been no loudspeaker announcement, but there had been a Tweet. Somebody had tweeted that the lecture going on across the hall was amazing. That Tweet was quickly endorsed by several others, in the form of what would later be officially dubbed a “retweet.” The information about the better lecture spread so quickly to people’s mobile phones and open laptops that the mob decided, almost simultaneously, to leave the discussion in favor of this “must-see” lecture across the hall.

  When I heard that story, I was amazed. But it was the next story that really made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

  That night, there were several parties and lots of packed bars. One person at a particularly crowded pub wanted to hear what his friends and colleagues were working on, but it was just too loud where he was. So this guy sent out a Tweet to his followers suggesting that if anyone wanted to enjoy a quieter conversation, they should meet him over at some other pub that he knew to be pretty empty. He named that pub in his Tweet.

  In the eight minutes it took this guy to walk over to the pub he had suggested, hundreds of people had done the same thing, from closer bars. By the time he arrived, the pub was at capacity and there was a long line to get in. His plan had backfired.

  What had happened? After this guy sent his Tweet, his followers thought it was a good idea, so they retweeted it to their followers, and so on. This had the snowball effect of creating a real-time swarm of humans—which descended upon this unsuspecting pub in an incredibly short amount of time.

  When I heard this story, I thought about a flock of birds flying around an object like a lamppost or a ship’s mast. When birds encounter an obstacle, they seem for a few seconds to become one organism. A flock moving as one around an obstacle looks incredibly practiced, almost choreographed. But it’s not. The mechanics of flocking are very simple. Each bird watches its neighboring bird’s shoulder and simply follows that spot. Twitter was creating the same effect. Simple communication, in real time, had allowed the many to suddenly, for a few seconds, become one. Then, just as quickly, they became individuals again.

  The people who went to SXSW were the types who were using Twitter actively—so this conference had an unusually high saturation of users for so early in the life of the product. This was the first time we had witnessed Twitter “in the wild.” Up until then, it had been just a bunch of our friends goofing around. Those two stories—the massive exodus from the lecture auditorium and the swarming of the bar—flipped a switch in my head and forever changed how I saw Twitter’s potential. Now I saw how strangers used the service, and it was a watershed moment.

  Flocking, schooling, and a phenomenon called emergence—where lots of animals seem to become one “superorganism” far smarter and more capable than any one individual—are common in nature. You see this groupthink in birds, fish, bacteria, and insects. But if you’ve ever tried to walk through a crowded subway platform or seen footage of Woodstock or flipped on C-SPAN, you know that human beings, as a species, don’t naturally flock. Now, for the first time, Twitter, as a new form of communication, was enabling human flocking. Twitter was providing an entirely new way for humans to connect. The example that night was only a bunch of people deciding to move to a different party locale—but what if it had been something more important? What if it had been a disaster? What if it had been a righteous cause?

  All these thoughts surged through my head when I heard the story about the impromptu pub crawl. Twitter was bigger than we had realized. With all our faults and vulnerabilities, our small team was going to create something that the world didn’t know it needed until it had arrived. We had invented a different form of communication, one whose potential was only just beginning to be discovered. If Twitter was to be a triumph, it wasn’t going to be a triumph of technology—it would be a triumph of humanity. I had never thought of technology—or business, in general—in those terms before. Success, I suddenly saw, came from how people used the tools they were given.

  We were flying high, so to speak, when, at the close of the conference, we went to watch the SXSW Interactive Awards, where various companies were commended for Best in Show, People’s Choice, Breakout Trend, and other such categories. Evan, Jack, and I were in the queue to go watch the awards show when a thought occurred to me.

  “Wait,” I said. “What if we win an award?” For years I’d sat
anonymously in the audience during the ceremony, but for the past few days Twitter had been the belle of the ball. There were no nominations for these awards. Who knew what might happen?

  “If we win something, we’ll have to say something,” I said.

  Ev said, “You’re right. We should have a speech ready in case we end up winning something. Jack should say it. You should write it,” he told me.

  Write a speech? We were literally standing in the doorway of the awards ceremony. It was impossible.

  I thought to myself, I can’t write a legitimately good speech. What can I write in the next three minutes that will come across as clever?

  Unlikely as it sounds, I’d been in this situation before. During my senior year of high school, I was in a humanities class. The classwork was structured around a yearlong project: a major piece of writing on a topic of our choice. As I’ll discuss later, I generally made it a policy not to do homework, but an assignment this major had to be completed. The whole grade would be based on this single project, which was due at the end of the year. This was a horrible arrangement for me; I was a major procrastinator.

  On the day the project was due, after a year of theoretical work, I had absolutely nothing to turn in. Nada. But I didn’t want an F!

  I went to class, and while everyone was passing in their papers, I said to my teacher, “I left mine at home on my desk. I can get it now or bring it tomorrow.”

  She said, “You had a year to do this. If you bring it in tomorrow, I’m going to dock you an entire grade.” An A paper would become a B paper.

  If I’d done the work, I certainly would have run home to get it. But from an F there was nowhere to go but up. I said, “Fine, if you think that’s fair. I’ll bring it in tomorrow.”