4 ms·

Successful companies built on second ideas

• imajes 17y ago
  > Twitter started as podcast delivery service. no it didn't. Odeo did, which Obvious bought back from investors (and later sold). Twitter was a product of Obvious when they realized Odeo wasn't going anywhere they wanted to be. I know it's semantics and technicalities, but it's a striking statement of how little the article's author really fact checked- which brings into question the rest of it.
  • gruseom 17y ago
    The article is just fine. Its theme is "second ideas that were more successful than original ones", and the Odeo guys' decision to switch focus to Twitter is a classic recent example. The blurb had all of three sentences. To take up such limited space with an irrelevant distinction between Odeo and Obvious would obviously have been odious.
  • recurser 17y ago
    Flickr seems like a fairly large omission as well.
  • RyanMcGreal 17y ago
    FTA: > After Ev Williams quit Google in 2005, he agreed to work partime for Odeo, a startup that syndicated podcasts through the RSS (the technology that brings blog posts to your Google Reader). > The gig became fulltime, but Odeo flopped. > So Ev and his friend Biz Stone decided to focus the company on a product Odeo employee Jack Dorsey had come up with: a site that broadcast the notes people put up in the AOL instant messenger away messages. Thus, Twitter was born.
• quizbiz 17y ago
  It's refreshing to know that we don't need to be completely new with our idea/approach.