Odeo bet on podcasting — Apple killed the market, the side project became Twitter

In 2004, Noah Glass and Evan Williams founded Odeo, a platform for discovering, creating, and sharing podcasts. Williams had previously sold Blogger to Google. Glass had founded Audioblog, a podcasting tool. Odeo raised funding and launched publicly on July 10, 2005. It was well-built and well-funded. The problem was timing: in June 2005, Apple announced that iTunes would support podcasting natively. Apple's entry into podcasting effectively ended the market for independent podcast platforms. Odeo had a product nobody needed.

By early 2006, Odeo's board recognized the company was in trouble. In a daylong brainstorming session, Jack Dorsey, an undergraduate working at Odeo, proposed a simple idea: an SMS-based service that let users broadcast short status messages to a group. The idea was inspired by the dispatch services used by couriers and emergency services. Williams was skeptical, but the team decided to build a prototype. The project was code-named 'twttr' — a name Noah Glass came up with, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes.

The first prototype was built by Dorsey and contractor Florian Weber in two weeks. It was used as an internal service for Odeo employees. On March 21, 2006, Dorsey published the first tweet: 'just setting up my twttr.' The full version launched publicly on July 15, 2006. By October, Williams, Stone, Dorsey, and other Odeo members formed Obvious Corporation and bought Odeo back from its investors. Williams fired Glass. The new company owned two things: the dying Odeo and the growing side project called Twitter.

Twitter's breakout moment came at the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive conference. Twitter placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, streaming live tweets. Usage jumped from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. By February 2010, Twitter handled 50 million tweets per day. The company that began as a podcasting platform that Apple killed had produced one of the most influential social media platforms in history. Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk in 2022 for $44 billion.