140 Characters » How Twitter Was Born

Twitter was born about three years ago, when @Jack, @Biz, @Noah, @Crystal, @Jeremy, @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, @Ev, me (@Dom), @Rabble, @RayReadyRay, @Florian, @TimRoberts, and @Blaine worked at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc. in South Park, San Francisco. The company had just contributed a major chunk of code to Rails 1.0 and had just shipped Odeo Studio, but we were facing tremendous competition from Apple and other heavyweights. Our board was not feeling optimistic, and we were forced to reinvent ourselves. “Rebooting” or reinventing the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where we broke up into teams to talk about our best ideas. I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. Later, each group presented their ideas, and a few of them were selected for prototyping. The first version of @Jack’s idea was entirely web-based. oh this is going to be addictive I was following everyone on the system.

filterfine notes on "hackers" Back when I was younger there used to be this big debate about the meaning of the word “hacking”. In the News it was always used to describe unsavory acts of theft, vandalism, and destruction. Hackers (the nice kind) invented new words to help them sort the hacker from the malicious hack like “crackers” or “script kiddies” but I don’t think it was until the Maker-scene and Linus Torvalds and countless open source hackers took the word back and permanently gave it the definition it deserved. Of all the books with the word “hackers” in it, the good one, aptly titled Hackers, did an excellent job at describing the early days of computing, all the way back to the Homebrew Computer Club and into the explosion and excess of the 80’s. It is what I think of when I think of hackers. People who sit down to solve a problem or invent something for the joy of figuring it out or making it better for others. And to be honest, who calls their parents that often? My favorite people make tools for people.

The Evolution of the Geek [Infographic] Are you a geek? Walyou is about tech and gadgets, but also geek culture. Let’s take a look at the Evolution of the Geek to see where you fit into our community. The word geek is said to originate from the word “gecken,” which back in the 16th century meant fool. So, this begs the question which we all know is dying to be answered … What kind of geek are you?