Anything Could Happen

What is Evan Williams doing?

I ask myself this as I consume a second cup of strong coffee in a quiet San Francisco café. It is early in the morning on the first workday of the new year, and Williams is apparently blowing me off. For the past two weeks he has ignored my e-mails, phone calls, and text messages. We were supposed to meet this morning to discuss his next move; instead we have radio silence.

This is odd. Williams is the sort of person who can't seem to do anything, no matter how trivial, without blogging, photo-sharing, or text-messaging the news. He founded Blogger, the website that introduced the world to blogging and now attracts some 163 million visitors each month. He has maintained a detailed personal blog for more than a decade--posting pictures, explaining his latest theories on business, and huffing about the cable company. His new business, called Twitter, takes it a step further: It lets exhibitionists, techies, and--a hint of things to come--marketers blast their latest doings to cell phones. So he's not just a practitioner of hyperconnectedness; he practically invented the concept.

Eventually, Williams sends me an apologetic text message--we resolve to push back the meeting slightly--and then he does something else: He uses Twitter to send a text message to, oh, a few thousand people: "Late for my first meeting of the year and in need of a shave."

Like so many technology entrepreneurs, Williams, whose friends call him Ev, is a software engineer. But unlike many of the most successful, he's no genius when it comes to programming. His specialty is taking a tiny, almost nonsensical idea and turning it into a cultural phenomenon. "He's like a master craftsman," says Naval Ravikant, a serial entrepreneur who is an angel investor in Twitter. "There are entrepreneurs who are financial geniuses, and there are raw coders. Evan is the master of creating a product where there wasn't one before." If Williams's art is the conception of inconceivable products, then Twitter is his chef-d'oeuvre.

What is Twitter? It's hard to explain--Williams and his co-founders have wrestled with this--but it helps to begin in familiar territory: blogging. A blog is an online diary, in which someone holds forth on a topic, like vacation itineraries or the case against Roger Clemens. Now strip this to the core. A typical entry--say, a couple of paragraphs, some links, pictures, or maybe a funny YouTube video--becomes a 140-character plain text comment. (That's the maximum length of a Twitter message--also known as a tweet--and the exact length of the previous sentence.) Instead of sitting down in front of a screen and typing a couple of paragraphs into a form, you compose your message quickly on your phone's keypad. Instead of having readers come to your website to check out your latest, you blast it directly to their cell phone inboxes. A recent selection of Williams's tweets includes: "Considering making February external-meeting free," "Relaxing my shoulders. Writing a little code. Drinking Guayaki," and "Packing my warmest clothes for Chicago." Each snippet is sent to his 5,644 (and counting) "followers," as they're called in Twitter-speak: the friends, acquaintances, and stalkers who have elected to keep tabs on his every move.

This is Twitter, in all its wildly popular, ridiculous glory. The service, which had a few thousand users at the beginning of last year, had close to 800,000 at the beginning of this one. Because Twitter allows anyone to send messages to thousands of cell phones at once and for free, new uses are popping up. JetBlue (NASDAQ:JBLU) and Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) use it as a kind of mailing list; presidential candidates use it to contact supporters; the Los Angeles fire department uses it as a de facto emergency broadcast system. As with all movements, there's a backlash. The United Arab Emirates recently banned the service, and there are lots of cautionary tales about Twittering gone bad. (I had such an experience when, en route to an unfortunately named barbecue restaurant, I Twittered, and then hastily deleted, this gem: "Walking to Smoke Joint.")

As a cultural phenomenon, Twitter is a comer--having been featured in an episode of CSI, on MTV, and in nearly every major newspaper--but its status as a business is nebulous. The 14-person company is unprofitable (its single largest source of revenue last year was the subleasing of half a dozen desks to three small start-ups at $200 a desk a month), and there are no immediate plans for it to be anything otherwise. Although some technologists think Twitter could one day be a billion-dollar company, many others say it represents the worst of Web 2.0: a company that is built to flip, that does little of value and has no long-term prospects as a standalone enterprise. Williams and his collaborators don't entirely dispute this notion. Co-founder Jack Dorsey, the service's inventor, freely admits that Twitter is "useless, in a sense" and that many people are "violently turned off" by the idea of constant communications. But, he adds, "there's a lot of value in seemingly useless things."

This strange statement encapsulates Williams's business philosophy. He believes that small ideas are almost always better than grand visions. That Twitter's main function--telling you what your friends are doing--is included as a feature in Facebook, MySpace, and most instant messaging programs doesn't bother him in the slightest. "I think features can make great companies," he says. "You just have to choose them right." Moreover, he argues, a product can succeed by doing less than a competitive product. Case in point: Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), which rocketed to popularity because of a single feature--the search box--while its chief competitor, Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), offered dozens of services, from search to stock quotes to horoscopes. Google operated for years without a business model before it figured out that it could throw off billions in cash by serving little text ads next to its search results. "Applying constraints can help your company and your customers in unexpected ways," says Williams. "The default thing we do is ask how we can add something to make it better. Instead we should say, What can we take away to create something new?"

That an entrepreneur can look at something as silly as Twitter and say, Yes, this is the future, is remarkable. Technology inventors have a horrible track record of turning new behaviors into long-term financial successes--social networking pioneer Friendster was long ago lapped by MySpace and Facebook; the first search engines, Web browsers, and video game systems met similar fates. And it's not as if Williams doesn't have the money (he made a reported $50 million selling Blogger to Google) or the connections (Twitter's angel investors read like a who's who of Silicon Valley) to attempt something more ambitious.