Twitter startups those years

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Review some of the company's early stories at the Twitter IPO.

Critical moment: The Internet is at a low ebb, Twitter has sprung up, to the minimalist and the ultimate Network service products to win attention and win the market. At this time, fierce competition, strong opponents, Twitter in the competition sometimes thrown into the sky, and sometimes fell to the bottom.

Key choice: Twitter complements Apple's iphone and becomes the love of young people on the Internet. It takes the user as the center, for the user to solve problems, will frequent the downtime as the main difficulty to conquer, not only overcame the difficulty, moreover has won the user's heart.

Key strategy: To win the market with passion and difficulty. Twitter treats every crisis, every adversary as a necessary experience and a partner in his own growth.

Policy Results: Twitter now publishes its IPO pricing range, saying it will sell 70 million shares at a price of 17 to 20 dollars per share. By this calculation, Twitter's biggest valuation in IPO deals is $10.9 billion trillion. Moreover, the IPO has become the only way for the development of the Twitter.

Twitter is an ancient Foley word that simulates the vibrations of a cricket's voice, and the modern people tremble with excitement, making the message brief and attached to the meaning of the explosion. At the mouth of the Twitter IPO, recall its entrepreneurial experience in the low tide of the internet, the process of winning the market with endless and innovative competition.

One day, Dorsey (then co-founder of Twitter) and CEO of the podcast company Odeo Evan (then the Twitter co-founder and chief executive) ate in a corner of the park, chatting about whether there were any new ideas for the current stalled Odeo company to adopt. Chatting, Jack suddenly remembered the information he had sent to the Golden Gate Park a few years ago stat.us service. Although the experience was unsuccessful, Jack believes that in the complex urban life, the idea of simplifying the effective way of exchanging and sharing information between people is correct.

Jack thought excitedly and immediately took the opportunity to show his boss Evan Stat.us. Like a ray of light that suddenly appeared in the dark, Evan a strong interest in the idea.

After a week of brainstorming, Jack adjusted the original concept of stat.us, combining it with text messages and incorporating minimalism into it. The initial service concept of Twitter was put forward in the discussion: send a short message to the person you are doing and pass it to someone who is interested in it. ' It's our difference principle to keep everything as simple as possible, ' Jack concludes.

It was 2006, when the Internet was at a low ebb after the explosion of the century and then the bursting of the bubble. Still, internet innovation is not over. Odeo Company immediately organized a team to develop and experiment with this new idea. The boss's support makes young Jack very excited, he is willing to work with many years of partners in the Evan under the leadership of the next show, a big fight.

Biz (then the founder of Twitter), inspired by the pink tone, designed the Twitter logo (later changed to Blue and joined the lively birds), and Noya Grass (after becoming one of Twitter's founders, but was driven out of the company in 2006) To do their best for the development and promotion of Twitter to do the groundwork for work, Jack study the basic function of Twitter products set. After repeated, we unanimously believe that Twitter insists on users and text messages as the core, around which provide a variety of services. For example, set the user as a concern and attention to the relationship. If you pay attention to someone, it can read the message sent by that person, and if you are concerned, then the message that he sends will be read by the followers. This group of entrepreneurs in the tense work schedule, always in a highly excited state, new ideas continue to sprout, the new function is a little bit to join and expand, Twitter more and more enrich, more and more perfect.

Extreme Simplicity

In the August 2006, people in the San Francisco earthquake recognized the unique characteristics of Twitter's new media. In the absence of any movement in traditional media, there have been reports of earthquakes on Twitter. A stone stirred thousands of heavy waves, Twitter users scramble to reprint transmission, quickly produced a message vibration-Twitter began to discuss the severity of the earthquake, people's feelings, escape precautions, and so on, and the concern and concern for friends and family are also on Twitter to get instant transmission. At this point, people really realize that Twitter is not just a tool for recreation and chatting, but also has many social functions. And these social functions are enough to impress people, because it leads to a revolution in the way of human communication. Very quickly, Twitter's users have grown from the initial 50 testers to thousands of.

The simplicity and sophistication of Apple have given a lot of inspiration to Twitter's founders. Apple's iphone was released in January 2007, and Twitter was in time to keep up with it, although Twitter's main service target was SMS users, but in research and development and testing, Twitter was constantly perfecting its capabilities to support inserting links and image sharing, so Twitter was able to run it successfully on the iphone. And its central, lightweight design and ensure the smooth operation. This directly contributed to the perfect combination of the iphone and Twitter. More and more young people are dog, and Apple and Twitter are among the favorites of this user, with a bite of white apples and blue birds.

Inspired by Apple's simplicity and ultimate spirit, and taking into account the character restrictions on cell phone messages, Jack shouted "We're going to change the world with 140 characters" slogan. This thought prompted Twitter to make another leap. On the one hand 140 characters saved the space of the website processing operation. On the other hand, 140 characters make the information more concise, more direct, and save the user's expenses. The customer therefore feels, the Twitter knows the design, more knows to stand in the user's angle to think, will push the special interpretation to be very humanized, very perfect. It turns out that Twitter is such a product that you can only slowly experience its pleasures and effects in your use, and become obsessed and unable to leave.

March 2007, the annual Southwest User Conference of the United States was held in Austin, Texas, the Twitter team, led by Jack, enthusiastically participated in the event, and Twitter was a great success: Twitter not only won the Web awards at the meeting, but also jumped sharply with Twitter popularity and awareness.

This large, world-wide rally is full of small teams and seminars, and the advent of Twitter provides a convenient way for participants in conferences and meetings to connect with friends-you don't have to go through crowds to find conversation goals, and you don't have to shout to arouse a friend's attention, You don't have to worry about being drunk and not getting help. With Twitter, all obstacles are no longer a hindrance, and all problems are no longer a problem. Often, these past problems once solved, bring you an unexpected surprise. People immediately like Twitter, have invited their friends to join, and in the process of attention, to meet a lot of new friends. In particular, participants inside and outside the Assembly felt that the thing was amazing, and that whatever happened, using Twitter, it felt like it was happening around.

The competition is coming!

With the success of Twitter, great influence and the sudden increase in users, the Web2.0 era has come to the attention of the Special Envoy. Not only that, but also the formidable competitors are not invited.

Jaiku, a microblogging service based in Helsinki, Finland, is dedicated to providing the organization, participation, promotion and sharing of activities through the Internet and mobile phone operations. Like Twitter, Jaiku also consolidates the API, which guarantees access to other services and makes Jaiku more functional. Jaiku is even better than Twitter, where the performance and stability of the Jaiku is stronger. Precisely at this time, Mantis, Oriole. Google has a crush on Jaiku and buys it. This is the October 2007 thing. Twitter met a formidable opponent.

The immediate consequence is that two microblogging products are placed together. In the past, one in the United States, one in Europe, "the road in the sky to walk half." Things are completely different now. Twitter has not matured, ie inattention formidable opponents. In particular, whether Jack, Evan, or Peezee, they were all employees of Google, they knew Google's strength: Google has plenty of money and a wealth of research resources, and Google is strong enough to develop products that rival Twitter.

Experienced people know that a kind of plant growing in the desert "Wolf poison", can be a poisonous "wolf poison Flower." It is toxic enough to kill people on the spot. But amazingly, anyone who travels in the desert sees this plant, not fearing it, but is ecstatic, because it has a salutary uniqueness: it can indicate the location of the water in the desert, thus giving birth to the people who walk in the desert. This is often the case in a commercial war: many times you seem to be in a crisis, and in a different way, perhaps you are facing a new opportunity.

The appearance of Jaiku by Google endorsement is so. The original obscure Twitter because of Google's acquisition of Jaiku, and blatantly declared war on Twitter, the Twitter micro-blog has proved the enormous potential value: to get Google's recognition, itself can prove that the technology and products in the next few years will have good prospects for development. So while the competition poses a threat to Twitter, it's also a good publicity role for Twitter from another perspective, making more people focus on Twitter.

What followed was a venture capital firm's focus on Twitter and a capital injection. Successful financing can provide a source of strength for the development of Twitter, so in the face of competitors, Twitter is not only not afraid, but more clear goals. Their first appeal is: instant and rapid, to provide users with a good experience and responsive ability. Twitter, as a service platform known for its swiftness, requires that it increase its responsiveness to between 200 and 300 milliseconds, far exceeding the accepted standard of response averaging 500 milliseconds.

Twitter faces a second plea for a formidable opponent, demanding mobility and convenience. Twitter not only supports traditional web browser access, but also supports mobile mobile platforms and access to a variety of instant messaging tools. For that reason, Twitter's engineers are scrambling to use the cache. They designed the cache of fragment cache and page cache, can invoke the program according to different requirements, thus improve the efficiency of the API channel.

Cute Down Whale

Google's takeover of Jaiku has not caused substantial harm to Twitter, but it has contributed to a certain degree of concern for Twitter. Even the black American presidential candidate, Barack Obama, used "just one signature and we can end the war in Iraq", a post on Twitter that quickly became a network of Big V and won the 2007 presidential election. At this time, Twitter's independent user access to 500,000 people, and the user upload information explosive growth is significantly beyond the push of the load limit. Twitter is primarily a content-oriented management system in the initial architecture process, so in the face of a lot of information, appears to be a bit powerless, so the phenomenon of frequent downtime, downtime, one months can be cumulative to 37 hours, which has become the most annoying Twitter users, but also the management of the most intractable problems.

"The House leaks partial rain", the competitor also comes to mess up the chaos. At this point, a competitor called Plurk, a visual microblogging site, was born. It learns to be minimalist, limits messages to 140 characters, and allows users to set their attention and attention to the Web site, and to keep an eye on people's information. Their unique place is the timeline, which allows users to easily access information by dragging the timeline. Plurk is undoubtedly challenging Twitter. Unlike Jaiku, Plurk is more accurate in product positioning and more experienced in product marketing. Its humanized design, convenient service, unique thermal computing system and time axis service attracts a large number of users. Soon, in some areas it was more popular than Twitter.

It seems that tackling downtime is an imminent problem, or Twitter will lose a lot of the market that has already occupied or is about to occupy. In the face of the dual challenges of system downtime and competition, Twitter feels unprecedented pressure. To reverse the situation, Twitter decided to abandon the development tools used previously and try to find new languages that support scalability. Finally, Twitter selected the Scala programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine platform, performing quite well, and hardly finding another language to match. It turns out that this is a wise decision. Soon, the speed of data processing was significantly improved, the number of downtime gradually decreased, and Twitter quickly greeted its users with friendly faces.

During the downtime crisis, Twitter also received an unexpected gain, known as the popularity of a crashed whale. This is an interesting picture: A stranded white whale was eight with a net rope of red birds struggling to pull into the sky, the picture of the caption is: Twitter is in the maintenance of downtime. This is Peezee on the website occasionally see Shanghai girl Lu Yiying Design works, the picture reveals lovely, helpless, united ... Sensitive Peezee eyes: When the whale stranded, eight birds unite to pull it to the sky reflected in the struggle of the spirit of teamwork is the true portrayal of all staff of Twitter! fondle admiringly, contact Lu Yiying immediately, spend money to buy this picture, put it on the website, As a tweet about downtime and a presentation of apologies.

The phenomenon of the down whale has led to a glimpse of Twitter's obsessive obsession with Twitter. In service and in maintenance, people's enthusiasm for it is undiminished. Indeed, an even system failure page is so vivid and unique web site is not popular and welcome? Twitter has responded to one challenge on the road to growth with its own efforts and creativity, and has been able to prove its strength and unique charm to the world at a critical juncture each time. Every time the "trembling" of Twitter won it a greater success.

(This article is based on Wang Yu "Twitter storm," a book rewrite)