didnt use this site nearly as much as i had wanted to, but its still sad to see it go. farewell!

daily knowledge: have you ever heard of noah glass? the guys who get the most fame for twitter's existence are jack dorsey (the "inventor") and evan williams (founded the company), but one of the most important guys to the whole startup was noah glass, who was erased from their history early on. basically noah glass created the technology and founded a company for a podcasting service called odeo and evan williams (ex-google employee, previously founded blogger) funded it. once itunes announced it was gonna add podcasting then everyone at odeo basically just collectively went "well shit," but this was after they had already taken around $5,000,000 in venture capital money. so they started brain storming and doing hackathons to see if they could come up with anything to kinda save the company. jack dorsey was just this random up and coming employee at the time, and he had the original idea for a service based around Status Updates at the time. the way it worked was you'd send a text message to a specific number, and the service would send that message out to all your friends, with a public website to serve as kind of a global feed and to save all your messages onto.

noah glass was the first guy at odeo to really "get" the idea of it. he was the first one to see the potential in it and really pushed to develop it further and make it the company's future, and just had an insane amount of commitment to making the idea work out. he's even the one who came up with the name twitter. so eventually after getting a whole team together for it and getting the rest of odeo on board the company was basically like "yeah this is our Product now." all the employees at the twitter office basically became addicted to using it so the company even agreed to pay their SMS bills.

with that sorted out, evan williams gathered up 5 million dollars, and went back to all the investors he took money from and bought odeo back from them outright. he did this whole thing where he was like "guys i'm sorry, this odeo product hasn't really panned out and i feel bad for taking all your money..... we have this other weird twitter product but ehhhhh you're probably not interested." so yeah, he bought back odeo and the company had full ownership over everything again. they were ready to go full force into twitter, and it's at this point, noah glass was fired. he was pushed out and subsequently left out of the conversation as twitter slowly blew up in the following years.

and the reason i bring up all of this, is because with that context, his twitter profile just hits different.

this is his profile

and if you scroll through all his tweets you really get a feel for how twitter was more of a "mass send SMS/say what you're doing right now" kind of service than a "try to start a whole conversation" service.

it's really hard to describe the feeling i get from these.

like on one hand it's just kinda funny. it's a cute little log of what some tech guy was doing in san francisco 17 years ago, but with all the context of what was going on with twitter and the knowledge and hindsight of everything that has happened with the site in the days since, it's just so interesting and weird looking back on.

they didn't really know what they were unleashing. it was just an innocent way to say things at your friends.

like.
every once in a while you'll see one that's just weirdly telling.

so much thought and feeling packed into a single sentence that was just randomly fired off between meetings or whatever.

and yeah, you can kinda tell that all these messages were sent in an era before the iphone.


following a two year absence from the site, he returned in 2013 to celebrate the birth of his daughter...

before finally, in september of that year, delivering his parting words to twitter, and the web as a whole.

he hasn't been seen on the internet since.
and if you scroll all the way back to may 10th, 2006, you'll see his first tweet was this.

boy am I ever! And get this, you're you, too!