Geekery

Geek God – Jack Dorsey

Posted on 18. Jan, 2010 by Jake in Geek God

Twitter creator Jack Dorsey helped transform the way the world communicates online. A true geek god, we owe him credit every time we tweet.

Weighing in at 138 characters, the above sentence summarises the content of this entire article, and, in the process, demonstrates the primary way that Twitter has changed the way we communicate – it has forced us to say less and reminded us of the importance of brevity, of stripping information of the unimportant frills and keeping it to the essentials. Twitter teaches us that if it can’t be said in140 characters or less it’s not worth saying.

“Simplicity, constraint and craftsmanship”, may sound like the slogan for an executive class automobile, but it is actually the personal guiding principles by which Dorsey lives his life. A cursory look at the site shows that these principles are very much in place. The social networking site (although Dorsey himself has rejected the term, stating that he sees Twitter’s role as spreading information rather than helping people socialize) is like Facebook grown-ups, there are no quizzes, no photos, no silly applications, no long comment threads. Instead, Twitter is all about the business, consisting of nothing but status updates of 140 characters or less. It provides a simple and effective way for you to inform people on where you’re at, and more importantly a way of seeing where, from friends to colleagues to one’s heroes to major companies and organisations.

Dorsey was a computer wizkid who was designing open source software in the area of dispatch routing at age 14. In 2000, at age 23, he started his own company, which dispatched couriers, taxis and emergency services from the web. It was then that he had his idea for a site that would allow users to communicate through real-time status updates. This would eventually lead to Twitter when Dorsey teamed up with Biz Stone (formerly from the company Odeo) and Evan Williams (who had worked for Google, selling them his two inventions – Blogger and Pyra Labs), and within 2 weeks they had made his idea a reality.

The rest, as they say, is history – we all know about how Twitter quickly became one of the most important forces on the internet. Interestingly, the site has no direct way of creating revenue, and for quite some time people have been speculating that Twitter will start charging users to use its service. That may be Twitter’s greatest ever test – if they can charge their users and still remain relevant and popular, than their position as one of the most powerful sources of information globally will be entrenched.

Tags: Jack Dorsey, social media, tweet, twitter, Web 2.0, Web 3.0