IN MARCH 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey were working on a new venture called Odeo, a podcasting service. Odeo was in something of a creative slump, and Dorsey wondered if a short messaging service that would enable everyone in the company to communicate with others in the group might be of some help.

Their solution, which the world now knows as Twitter Inc., was to build a simple Web application that would let the team stay in touch by sending short 140-character messages to the rest of the group. It wasn’t long before they realized that the new application held considerably more promise than the original podcasting idea on which they had been working.

The rest of the story is history. Twitter reached its tipping point at the South by Southwest festival in 2007, where the number of tweets per day jumped to 60,000 and it won the festival’s Web Award. Whether or not Twitter will develop a viable business model remains in question, but the Twitter story is a powerful reminder that...

So, What’s the Problem?

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Publication/Copyright: MIT Sloan Management Review