by Biz Stone
As the use of the @ symbol evolved, we updated the site. People started using the symbol not just to talk to a specific person, but to reference something, as in
I rode @BART to work.
In 2009 we started referring to @ replies as “mentions,” and collected them on profile pages so a person (or BART) could easily see all the places where he, she, or it had been mentioned. Later we collected them so that people could follow a conversation on Twitter.
Retweeting was a little more controversial. We noticed that when someone liked a Tweet, she would copy and paste it into her Twitter field. When she tried to credit the author, she’d exceed the character count, so she’d have to abridge the original Tweet. Then she’d add “RT” to indicate that it was a retweet.
We said, okay, this is a useful feature, because if a Tweet is good and people want to retweet it, a good idea could spread. But we should make a button that retweets the original in such a way that you can’t modify it. That way, people won’t be misquoted. The Tweet will be posted on your behalf in its pure form. Also, because it will be a button, it will be easier than cut-and-paste, which is so clunky. Popular Tweets will spread really fast. So if there’s a particularly good Tweet from a guy who has seventeen followers, and I retweet to my two hundred with the click of a button, the Tweet will spread like wildfire.
Making retweeting into a one-click action was useful to us because it was trackable. If something was retweeted a lot, this signaled to us that it was interesting or important. We could use retweeting to pull hot topics to the surface. We would eventually create an area called “Discover” that, among other things, highlighted the most retweeted Tweets.
Initially people were annoyed. They didn’t like the fact that you couldn’t edit a retweet. They were used to controlling it and didn’t want that to change. But we held strong. Sometimes people resist change. Our way preserved the integrity of the original Tweet, and it allowed us and users to trace its path, and know for sure exactly who said what. Nobody could fake retweets from other people. This is an example of how we listened to our users but also considered what we believed made the most sense for the community and the service, confident that even the detractors would soon see that.
This is true emergence, the wisdom of crowds—like flocking, it represents group members making choices together. The bigger message of the nomenclature evolution was exactly what I had been telling new Twitter employees. It was our job to pay attention, to look for patterns, and to be open to the idea that we didn’t have all the answers.
The reason this approach to business is unorthodox is that in many traditional forums, you simply can’t have such direct contact with your users. If you’re a basketball manufacturer, you can’t see all your customers bouncing the balls. But we could see the Tweets. It was impossible not to. We couldn’t read every one, but they were crossing our screens all day long. So this approach was especially relevant to a tool like Twitter. We had the benefit of being able to watch how people used it. It taught us open-mindedness.
If this book were limited to 140 pages,
it would end here.
I had thought that what I was doing was building a company that was true to my ideals, but what actually happened along the way is that I built a brand. The Twitter brand became recognizable and strong. We attracted so much press and intellectual brain space that we were prematurely lumped in with Facebook—in truth, we were a tiny fraction of its size.
Our first holiday party, in December of 2008, took place in the wine room of Millennium, a vegan restaurant in San Francisco where we’d also held the Odeo holiday parties. Around a dozen employees, we were small enough to fit into the back room. I recently found the old slide show from that party. We were still keeping mum about how many users we had. The truth was that we were up to 685,000 registered people, from 45,000 at SXSW. Not bad for a project that was just over a year old. But the media buzz was that we had ten million users. Whenever people asked me how many we had, I always said, “The number of users doesn’t matter. All that matters is that people are finding the service interesting and useful.” Sticking to our own rules was paying off. The brand was huge before the service was huge.
Two years later the day would come when we hit, then surpassed, 100 million users. In 2010, at the first and only Chirp Conference, a professional gathering for the Twitter development community, I got up onstage and said the same thing I’d always said: “The number of users doesn’t matter. All that matters is that people are finding the service interesting and useful.” But this time, as I said it, I clicked the Next button to show a new slide I’d just added to my talk. It read, “140 million.” Even humility has a time and place.
In March of 2009, I celebrated my thirty-fifth birthday. I tweeted,
Today’s my birthday. I’m in my thirties!
A snarky gossip website caught on to the mislead and tried to make something of it, but I had merely been amusing myself with one of my mentor Steve Snider’s old games: offering two truths that amount to a lie. Once, I went out to dinner to Golden Era, a Chinese restaurant in Brookline, with him and his family, and someone said to him, “Oh, is this your son?” Steve responded, “Marlene and I were married in 1973, and Biz was born a year later.” Two true but unrelated statements that made his answer to the question seem like a yes.
When I first worked as a freelance designer, I made my company a website. To liven up the home page, I scanned in a beautiful picture from the Pottery Barn catalogue, showing a gorgeous office overlooking a garden. One day, I went to a meeting at a school. It was for a good gig, one I really wanted, designing a whole series of books. The women I met with said, “We really like your office.” I was actually working out of the dank basement of my mom’s house then, so at first I had no idea what she was talking about. Then it dawned on me. She thought that Pottery Barn picture was my office.
I didn’t lie. Not exactly. I just said, “Oh, yeah. It’s a dream office.”
When Livia and I lived briefly in LA, we had two cats even though we weren’t allowed to have pets in our apartment. Livia was always worried that the landlady would check in and see the cats. I said, “Here’s what you do. If the landlady comes by and says, ‘I see that you have cats,’ what you say is ‘We have friends who are out of town. We’re taking care of these cats.’” Both of those sentences were true. We had lots of out-of-town friends back in Boston. And we were absolutely taking care of those cats.
I guess my point is that even at thirty-five, I was still willing to stretch the truth a little bit to give the impression I wanted to give. In other words, I was a bit of a clown. But things were getting more serious.
We were in the game, and—from how we responded to our users to how we interacted with governments to how much we were worth—we got to make our own rules.
My earliest experience making my own rules came when I entered high school. In the first weeks of my freshman year, I tried to do everything right. I did exactly what I was told to do—and this included my homework. After lacrosse practice and my after-school job as a box boy at a local supermarket, I got home around 8:00 p.m. At this point, I was expected to eat dinner, do homework, and go to sleep so I could wake up and do it all over again.
The first weeks of my freshman year, I forged ahead with this plan. There was a certain amount of reading for history class, problems to be solved for math, and similar nightly assignments from English, political science, chemistry, biology, and more. The workload added up, and I’m not particularly fast at reading or doing any of that kind of work, for that matter. In fact, I tend to take longer than most people to absorb information and work on problems. But that first week, I was determined to get it all done. If everyone else was doing it, so would I.
I quickly discovered that trying to complete all the homework assigned to me meant staying up almost all night long every night. I couldn’t quit lacrosse—I’d created the team! And I needed my job in order to contribute to the family income
. My mother’s jobs, when she could get them, were not enough to pay the bills. She’d sold the house she grew up in for a lesser house, banking the profit so we had money to live on. That had lasted a while, and then she’d had to do it again. We’d moved a bunch of times. By high school, the house we lived in had an actual dirt floor downstairs and walls without plaster. Now I could honestly say that we were “dirt poor.” My mom and I did our best to improve the house on the weekends, but we always needed more money.
This whole homework thing clearly wasn’t going to work. I decided to take matters into my own hands and implement a “No-Homework Policy.” My plan was simple. I would work as hard as possible to pay attention and be completely focused in each class, but I would not bring my books home, and I would not do any of the homework assigned to me. If the homework was intended to reinforce what was taught in class, I would be fine—because I would make sure to absorb it all during the school day. Once I landed on this solution, a sense of relief washed over me. All that was left was the small matter of communicating my new policy to my teachers.
The next day, one by one, I walked each of my teachers through my plan. The conversation went pretty much the same with all of them: First, I said hello and reintroduced myself. Then I explained that I’d been attempting to do all my homework for the past two weeks. (I may also have hinted that perhaps the teachers might communicate with one another more about how much work they were assigning to students.) I told them that doing the work took me until approximately 4:00 a.m. Regrettably, I was unable to sustain this. Then I introduced my No-Homework Policy.
Some of the teachers laughed, but ultimately all of them told me in their own ways that if I really wanted to go ahead with this, I could, but it would affect my overall grade. I was willing to live with that.
From that point on, I didn’t do homework. I paid attention in class and strived to absorb the material. Ultimately, perhaps because I had been so up front and clear in my communication of the policy, my teachers did not end up penalizing me. In other words, my No-Homework Policy didn’t have an impact on my overall grades. It was, for all intents and purposes, a rousing success.
I distinctly remember the reaction one of my friends in high school had to this policy. Matt was a great student, but it didn’t seem to come easy for him. Though he worked very hard, he had quite a bit of anxiety about taking tests and quizzes, and about his grades in general. At the end of one day in the middle of our freshman year, we were both at our lockers. Matt was loading his backpack up with books. I was dumping all my books from my backpack into my locker, not to be seen again until school the next day.
As I closed my locker and it was apparent to Matt that I had no books, not to mention a backpack, Matt asked me how I was going to do my homework.
“Oh,” I said. “I have a No-Homework Policy.”
Matt looked incredulous. He laughed nervously. “You’re joking.”
“Matt,” I said, having a little fun with him. “This is America. We can do whatever we want. Freedom. I have a No-Homework Policy and it’s great.”
I shut my locker with unusual emphasis and headed to lacrosse practice, unencumbered.
I wasn’t against rules per se; I just liked to look at the big picture. Staying up until four in the morning wasn’t realistic. Something had to give.
The point of this story isn’t “cocky kid blows off homework and gets away with it,” though on the surface that’s exactly what happened. Homework is generally regarded as useful, and far be it from me to mount a one-man campaign against it. (Not right now, anyway. Talk to me when my kid is twelve.) But I had an idea for a different way to do things, one that worked better for me. There was no harm in proposing this to the school administration. There was no danger in trying. The point of school, after all, isn’t to do homework. The point of school is to learn. When I realized this, I stopped caring about grades. As high school progressed, I focused on learning what inspired me, so I might get an A+ in genetics and a C in something easy. I was by no means a model student, but I deliberately, consciously chose my path. It was a mistake to assume that teachers—or anyone else, for that matter—automatically knew what was best for me. If I could better accomplish the mutually agreed-upon goal through my own approach, wasn’t it worth a shot?
If anything, opportunities like this are easier to recognize and implement in the workplace. Do you work best in a dimly lit room? Do you perform better with an afternoon nap? Would you like to work on a side project that is more interesting to you? Is there a different way to think about your business? Rules are there to help us—to create a culture, to streamline productivity, and to promote success. But we’re not computers that need to be programmed. We’re all a bunch of oddballs. Just because someone has authority doesn’t mean they know better. If you approach your bosses or colleagues with respect, and your goals are in alignment, there’s often room for a little customization and flexibility. And on the other side, those in positions of power shouldn’t force people to adhere to a plan for the sake of protocol. The solution, always, is to listen carefully—to your own needs and to those of the people around you.
My irreverence came into play again when I went to my first high school dance. Ordinarily I didn’t rise to the social challenge of high school functions—especially not dances. The anxiety and embarrassment quotients were just too high. Plus, my friends and I were nerds, so what free time we had we preferred to devote to reading comic books or playing video games.
However, near the end of my senior year, as my friend Jay and I sat in his attic reading Batman comics, it occurred to me that the absolutely last dance we’d ever get the opportunity to attend as high school kids was scheduled for that very night. I put down my comic book.
“Jay, we can’t miss the dance tonight.”
He looked up with some surprise. After all, we always missed the dances. “Why not?” he said.
“It’s a rite of passage. This is our last chance.” All of a sudden, I was completely impassioned. I made an impromptu speech about how important this moment was and how we couldn’t let it pass us by or we would regret it for the rest of our lives. Twenty years from now, when we were old men of thirty-eight, we would sit in rocking chairs on a front porch somewhere, shaking our heads with disappointment at the tragic choices of our younger selves. (But, I paused to muse, we’d definitely have cars and be allowed to drive them by then. Cool.) Seriously, though, we had to go to the dance.
Jay sighed and put down his comic book. He could see that I wasn’t going to let this go.
Even now that Jay was somewhat persuaded, this eleventh-hour decision was going to be tricky to execute. It was already 8:40, and the doors to the dance closed in twenty minutes. There was a strict rule that nobody could be admitted after 9:00 p.m. Neither of us had a driver’s license or a car. We’d have to get on our bicycles and ride like hell to get there in time.
We pedaled furiously down the streets of Wellesley, but as we approached the school cafeteria, ready to pay our six-dollar entry fee, we saw that the doors were closed. Standing in front of them, like a prison guard, was the vice principal. We were two minutes late, max.
Panting, I managed to say, “We’re here for the dance.”
“You’re too late. The doors are closed,” the vice principal said drily.
“Okay, I understand,” I said.
Jay gave me a curious look. He knew me well enough to wonder why, after my passionate declamation, I wasn’t smooth-talking my way in. Normally I would have tried, but I could see from the vice principal’s demeanor that tonight that approach wouldn’t fly.
I turned around and said, “C’mon Jay, let’s do something else.”
Jay suspected something was up, and he was right. There was no way I’d give up that easily. We had to attend this dance. My resolve was as strong as it had been for the past twenty-two minutes. As we walked away from the doors, and the vice principal, I muttered to Jay, “We’re still getting in.”
> We crept around to the other side of the cafeteria, where there were giant tilt-in windows. Surely they would be open, to ventilate a cafeteria full of sweaty teenagers. Climbing in would be a piece of cake.
Sure enough, the windows were open. We slipped in. A few kids noticed, but what did they care?
“We’re in, Jay. This is it. Our last-ever high school dance. Let’s make it count!”
In our high-speed plot session, Jay and I had decided that we’d put aside all insecurities, assume false bravado (an early manifestation of Biz Stone, Genius), and ask the girls we’d always had crushes on to dance with us. We turned around to do just that—and there he was. Vice Principal Buzzkill. His jaw dropped when he saw us. Busted. He ordered us to follow him upstairs to his office.
We trudged up the stairs, first the vice principal, then me, with Jay bringing up the rear. When we got to the top and started down the hall toward his office, I was hit by a sudden impulse. By George, I was going to stick to my plan, come hell or high water. While the vice principal walked briskly forward, I spun around and started back down the stairs.
As I whisked by, I whispered to Jay, “We’re still doing this.”
Jay hesitated for a moment, frozen, eyes wide. At that moment, the vice principal must have turned back. He yelled something down the stairs in the direction of the cloud of dust I’d left behind. Jay bolted after me. The chase was on!
I bounded quickly to the bottom of the stairs, where I bumped into one of my best friends, Marc Ginsburg. Marc and I had grown up together. As a kid, I had practically lived at his house. His dad was a successful dentist, so he’d bought the family an Apple IIe that we used constantly. Marc was taller than me, but he had similar hair and features. When I spotted him, I said, “Don’t ask me why, but switch T-shirts with me right now.”