The Short history of Twitter told by Nick Bilton: “All Is Fair in Love and Twitter”

I still remember the day time I signed up the tweets where flowing so slowly that you actually could read the Twitter Public Stream.

This is a Soap opera view on the top-level of Twitter and the roles various people have played within it.

In Silicon Valley, most companies have their own Twitter story: a co-founder, always a friend, and often the person with the big idea behind the company, who is pushed out by another, hungrier co-founder. Ronald Wayne, was written out of the founding story of Apple, even though he was a third co-founder of the company. For a time, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen were given sole credit for inventing a video-sharing service that later sold to Google for nearly $2 billion; yet a third man, Jawed Karim, also came up with YouTube. Snapchat, the latest tech darling, is currently being sued by Reggie Brown, who was pushed out of the company in its early days. And of course, there is Mark Zuckerberg, whose travails and claim of ownership in Facebook ended in several lawsuits and a feature-length film about his supposed deceptions.

But unlike Facebook, Twitter really was a collaboration; an idea that came out of a failed podcasting company that happened to come about at the right time. While Dorsey had the germ of the idea, without the collaboration of the people who worked at Odeo, that idea would have remained just an idea. Glass’s realization that the initial concept could be adapted to connect people to their friends was significant. And the name he came up with undoubtedly helped, too. Without Williams and Stone influencing its development with the lessons they learned from Blogger, it still would not have taken off. Making it a company required Williams’s money, then Wilson, Sabet and Fenton’s and dozens of other investors, not to mention Costolo, who turned it into viable business, and 2,000 employees who helped shape it into one of the biggest social networks on the planet. Such is the case with every company in Silicon Valley, though you never hear it in their creation myth. Dorsey will make $400 million to $500 million when Twitter goes public. Glass stands to make about as much as Dorsey’s secretary at Square.