9781422277324

1: Hatching Twitter

The people he listened to on the police scanner did not speak in full sentences. Instead, they used short codes to com- municate what was happening. Dorsey thought this was very ef- ficient, and began thinking of ways these short bursts of com- munication could be used in other areas of life. The signals he listened to through his police scanner became his very first inspi- ration for the future creation of Twitter. An Idea Forms W hile still in college, Dorsey was already a programming wizard in great demand. He dropped out of New York Uni- versity and began to think about how technology could be used to improve the world. He reflected on the dispatch conversations he listened to as a child and thought of ways to apply that think- ing to the internet, which was now expanding rapidly. When he began working for a podcasting company in 2005, his dreams began to take shape. Dorsey saw a clear connection between the internet and the increasing use of cell phones. “Now, we all have these cell phones. We had text messaging. Suddenly we could update where I was, what I’m doing, where I’m going, how I feel. And then it would go out to the entire world,” he said in an interview. At the time, smartphones were uncommon and just start- ing to come out. If Jack wanted to connect everyday people to the internet through cell phones, he would need to do it through

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