Gawker just published a great piece on the whitewashing of certain elements of their history. It’s hard to argue that Evan Williams made the wrong decision to force out Odeo co-founder Noah Glass, but you still must feel for Glass for being denied the credit he deserves for the creation of such a game changing platform.
Odeo cofounder Noah Glass gravitated toward Jack Dorsey, whom Glass says was “one of the stars of the company.” Jack had an idea for a completely different product that revolved around “status”—what people were doing at a given time.
“I got the impression he was unhappy with what he was working on – a lot of cleanup work on Odeo.”
“He started talking to me about this idea of status and how he was really interested in status,” Glass says. “I was trying to figure out what it was he found compelling about it.”
“There was a moment when I was sitting with Jack and I said, ‘Oh, I do see how this could really come together to make something really compelling.’ We were sitting on Mission St. in the car in the rain. We were going out and I was dropping him off and having this conversation. It all fit together for me.”
One day in February 2006, Glass, Dorsey, and a German contract developer Florian Webber presented Jack’s idea to the rest of the company. It was a system where you could send a text to one number and it would be broadcasted out to all of your friends: Twttr.
