A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.
This week: A video visit with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Chris Wetherell and his creation, Brizzly, a Web-based social media reader.
It all started with a “stupid” idea and a message about pinot noir.
Two of the founders of Twitter Inc., Evan Williams and Biz Stone, talked about how the micro-blogging service began, the challenges it faced and an eventual potential IPO, at Startup School, an event organized by Y Combinator held at the University of California-Berkeley on Saturday.
Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter, called the service’s recent attacks a sign of its significance in a PBS interview that airs Thursday.
“You are not a target until you become popular,” he said, after PBS’s Tavis Smiley commented that the denial-of-service attacks were a “backhanded compliment.”
As Facebook, Twitter and other popular Internet services investigated the cause of this week’s massive computer attacks, attention turned to a blogger whose writings blasting Russian officials may have been the target.
Some members of Twitter, the microblogging service, received a surprise over the weekend when they were informed that the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, had joined the site. “Dalai Lama (OHHDL) is now following your updates on Twitter,” the message read. But @OHHDL was an impostor, it was revealed, and banned from the site.
The Twitter guys have been getting a lot of flak over the past few months (and rightly so, in many cases) for the unreliability of their app. But I think they should get some props for opening up and talking about what’s going on over there. Granted, this newfound desire to engage in dialogue (or damage control) should have come a lot earlier, at least in my opinion, but at least they are doing it now. They’ve even managed to foil Mike Arrington’s attempt to start a late-weekend bitchmeme by asking some rather pointed questions of the company
When Twitter suffered a brownout last weekend, the “twitterati” had a collective conniption. I suppose the good news for co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone is that the bad news kicked up such a storm.
Lots of people are so addicted to Twitter that the intermittent problems wreaked havoc with their daily routine.
Lead architect Blaine Cook and VP of engineering and operations Lee Mighdoll are now gone. And it’s up to management to come up with a plan. But this isn’t the first time a popular online communication service found itself a target of criticism. In August 1996, America Online got in even bigger trouble after going dark for 19 hours.
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