How Tweet It Is
New York Magazine, February 08, 2009
Sure, the Twitter guys still have no idea how to make money off their fabulous invention. But for now they are living in a dreamworld of infinite possibilities, maybe the last one on Earth.
In case you don’t remember the precise details of what the Silicon Alley dot-com boom-and-bust in the late nineties and early aughts was like, allow me to remind you, because I was there. Everyone showed up to work, hung-over, around 11:30 a.m., just in time for our free lunch. There were about six different dogs in the office. Everyone left around 6 p.m. to go drink on the company bar tab or show up at ubiquitous “launch parties,” extravagant affairs (often on a boat that circled Manhattan) that celebrated the historic occurrence of a website going live.
Mostly, I remember the meetings. We’d have about four meetings a day, in which a group of overpaid twentysomethings would ramble on for an hour about “content integration” and “vertical scalability,” just long enough to make it look like we were doing something. The nine months I worked at a dot-com back then were epic slack, all done in the name of The Future. We were changing the world. We believed. In something, anyway. The rest of the world didn’t matter.
The company I worked for died, as did hundreds of others. But the belief didn’t. Which brings me to Twitter. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, 34, wearing the casual yet composed Accomplished Techie uniform of an unbuttoned dress shirt over requisite logo tee and jeans, sits in a well-lit conference room in San Francisco, sharing a floor with mobile-software company iSkoot. Though he’s surely aware that the rest of the planet is in full-fledged depression panic, he doesn’t act like it. Inside Twitter, there is no economic downturn. Stone talks about “groundbreaking ideas” and Twitter’s unique place of responsibility. He talks about branding, provoking growth, and, yes, “scalability.” Twitter lives in its own bubble of The Future, while the rest of us are barnacles unfortunate enough to scrape by in the present. He sounds like everyone I worked with back in the dot-com days. He has the hot product. He might be right. But back then we all thought we were right, too.
