Twitter: Where It's Been and Where It'll Go

A lot of things in life begin with an idea and are molded and changed until they have a true purpose. The social networking site, Twitter, is one of those things.

Last week, Christopher Isaac (more commonly known as Biz Stone), the co-founder of Twitter visited Ball State. He led a forum event discussing "Twitter's rocky beginning and his plans to make the site a more useful information source", as explained in this article.

Stone never finished college, as he dropped out to work with book cover designing. He became a Web entrepreneur when he founded Xanga, a social networking site. He met Evan Williams and they became business partners as they created Odeo, one of the first podcast companies.

Eventually this site developed into the social networking site which would become Twitter.

Stone and Williams realized the potential of their site in 2007, when they noticed attendees at a festival using Twitter to invite each other to different places around the convention. It appeared that the site was making the humans flock like animals, and that's how they decided on the name Twitter.

In 2009 they noticed Twitter was critical for media and world leaders to share information on the situation in Iran. Stone stated "Twitter can be a complementary source for news because it offers the first bit of information in 140 characters, leaving the media to develop the full story."

Today Twitter has over 165 million registered accounts.

With so much success already, Stone wants to continue shaping Twitter into a tool to help people find information that's relevant to them right now. He says there are plenty of applications that will help this process along.

Stone wrapped it up saying, "I don't know what they (the untapped used for Twitter) are yet. I think a lot of it's going to be our job in trying to unlock it, by creating more relevance, by helping discovery and helping serendipity.