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Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal Hardcover – November 5, 2013
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, November 2013: Spoiler alert: The subtitle sorta says it all. That is, Nick Bilton's Hatching Twitter delivers "A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal," though not necessarily in that order. The book's four central players--Ev, Jack, Biz, and Noah--conceived of Twitter while working on Odeo, an ultimately doomed attempt to revolutionize podcasting. As their little chick grew, the four men's personal and ideological differences led to a power struggle that eventually left them all on the sidelines as a former stand-up comedian took Twitter into the uncertain future. Writing with the pacing and veracity of detail of a true-crime book, Bilton makes use of a trove of source material--from internal Twitter e-mails to extensive interviews with and early tweets by the founders themselves--and the result is as exciting and fast-paced as it is topically relevant. If you're looking for a thoughtful rumination about Twitter as a revolutionary global communications platform, keep looking. If you're looking for a quick, well-written, thoroughly researched human drama, the story of an utterly dysfunctional foursome and the accelerated unraveling of their once brilliant partnership, this is your book. #HighlyRecommended. --Jason Kirk (@brasswax)
Review
"Bilton tells the story with verve."
-- The Guardian
"Fast-paced and perceptive."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Exhaustively researched...extensively detailed...unexpectedly addictive."
--The Wall Street Journal
"#Backstabbing, power struggles and profanity laid bare"– "It is breathless storytelling"
--The New York Times
"Deeply reported and deliciously written."
--The Verge
"A compelling read, more like espionage than a corporate history."
--Fortune Magazine
"A dramatic and detail-rich recounting."
--Cnet
"With a cinematic approach befitting its eclectic cast of characters, the perceptive read…is rife with Byzantine-like intrigue, character clashes and broken dreams."
--USA Today
"Goes where no book has gone before."
--The Huffington Post
"Unputdownable."
--The Wall Street Journal
"A fast-paced read, chock-full of details."
--New York Magazine
"Nick Bilton’s impressively detailed fly-on-the-wall exposé of the micro-blogging site’s birth and evolution evokes all the titillating elements of a soap opera."
-Success Magazine
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
215 of 224 people found the following review helpful
By
Rabble
on November 5, 2013
Format: Kindle Edition
Verified Purchase
11 Comments
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I'm Rabble, one of the people who helped start Odeo and i'm mentioned a bunch in the first couple chapters. This review might not be useful for evaluating the book as something to read, but i figured this might be a decent forum to provide a review.
The story is very well told. It's a captivating read. It's very surreal to read about your friends and former co-workers in a book like this. Most of us live our lives only ourselves. Having this book is kind of like having a well researched MTV Rock Documentary about our work, friendships, and time in our lives. I think if you interview enough people, look at what happened in any situation, it's easy to put a spin and story on things. None of us know the details of everybody else's life.
I wish there'd been more discussion about the technical and models we pulled from to build twitter. Where the ideas came from and how they were put together. It's very weird to see how much focus there is on people's drinking, clothing, hygiene, and being broke. That we were pulling from txtmob, the unix finger command, carlton university's status update system, bike messenger dispatch, blogger, etc... that's not as sexy a story. That we considered how to look at transitions of mediums from desktop to web, from web to mobile, as a place to create new systems for communications in old ways, isn't as cool as intrigue amongst friends who ended up creating twitter. There's a lot of the people and not as much understanding twitter and it's context.
The order of things as they happened and as they are told in the book isn't the same. This is ok, i think, mostly because the book is about telling the story of twitter's creation. It's no a strict chronology. Reordering things makes for a better story arc.Read more ›
The story is very well told. It's a captivating read. It's very surreal to read about your friends and former co-workers in a book like this. Most of us live our lives only ourselves. Having this book is kind of like having a well researched MTV Rock Documentary about our work, friendships, and time in our lives. I think if you interview enough people, look at what happened in any situation, it's easy to put a spin and story on things. None of us know the details of everybody else's life.
I wish there'd been more discussion about the technical and models we pulled from to build twitter. Where the ideas came from and how they were put together. It's very weird to see how much focus there is on people's drinking, clothing, hygiene, and being broke. That we were pulling from txtmob, the unix finger command, carlton university's status update system, bike messenger dispatch, blogger, etc... that's not as sexy a story. That we considered how to look at transitions of mediums from desktop to web, from web to mobile, as a place to create new systems for communications in old ways, isn't as cool as intrigue amongst friends who ended up creating twitter. There's a lot of the people and not as much understanding twitter and it's context.
The order of things as they happened and as they are told in the book isn't the same. This is ok, i think, mostly because the book is about telling the story of twitter's creation. It's no a strict chronology. Reordering things makes for a better story arc.Read more ›
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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful
By
Lane Becker
on November 9, 2013
Format: Hardcover
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Having lived and worked in and around Silicon Valley for most of my adult life, I have always felt that one of the most frustrating things about this still-amazing place is that it never seems content to just tell the world the truth about how technology is made.
Building products--successful and unsuccessful ones alike--requires a lot of things: A solid idea, the right team to execute on it, and good timing, certainly, but on a more complicated note, personal connections, social capital, back-room deals, and, most of all, a whole hell of a lot of luck. Yet the stories that get told about Silicon Valley all too often gloss over all of this (and the power-grabbing and horse-trading that always accompany it) in favor of the much simpler and totally inaccurate narrative about the brilliance of "that one guy." The "founder." The "inventor." The one who made all the money and took all the fame. Never mind the other people who helped come up with it, the people who supported it, the people who contributed to it, the people who toiled away to make it a real thing. Nope: Just that guy. You know, the next Steve Jobs!
Not so "Hatching Twitter." A lot of the reviews here have focused on how compelling Bilton tells this story, weaving the narrative of the tool's creation around some impressively researched details about a seemingly never-ending litany of back-stabbing. That's completely true, and the book's a worthwhile read for that alone.Read more ›
Building products--successful and unsuccessful ones alike--requires a lot of things: A solid idea, the right team to execute on it, and good timing, certainly, but on a more complicated note, personal connections, social capital, back-room deals, and, most of all, a whole hell of a lot of luck. Yet the stories that get told about Silicon Valley all too often gloss over all of this (and the power-grabbing and horse-trading that always accompany it) in favor of the much simpler and totally inaccurate narrative about the brilliance of "that one guy." The "founder." The "inventor." The one who made all the money and took all the fame. Never mind the other people who helped come up with it, the people who supported it, the people who contributed to it, the people who toiled away to make it a real thing. Nope: Just that guy. You know, the next Steve Jobs!
Not so "Hatching Twitter." A lot of the reviews here have focused on how compelling Bilton tells this story, weaving the narrative of the tool's creation around some impressively researched details about a seemingly never-ending litany of back-stabbing. That's completely true, and the book's a worthwhile read for that alone.Read more ›
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29 of 35 people found the following review helpful
By
Phil Simon
on November 6, 2013
Format: Hardcover
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1 Comment
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Bilton's book rivals The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon in its scope and unflinching honesty. Through copious research and interviews, Bilton weaves together the heretofore untold story of one of the most influential companies of our times.
In a word, Twitter was a complete mess--technology-wise, strategy-wise, and management-wise. It's amazing that the company is purported to be worth nearly $10B.
I like that fact that Bilton pulls no punches, calling out self-anointed Steve Jobs's successor Jack Dorsey. Dorsey comes across as petulant, egomaniacal, and cunning. I had doubts that he was the second coming of Apple's iconic leader, and the book only confirmed my suspicions. Biggest myth debunked in the book: Dorsey did not invent Twitter.
Excellent read.
In a word, Twitter was a complete mess--technology-wise, strategy-wise, and management-wise. It's amazing that the company is purported to be worth nearly $10B.
I like that fact that Bilton pulls no punches, calling out self-anointed Steve Jobs's successor Jack Dorsey. Dorsey comes across as petulant, egomaniacal, and cunning. I had doubts that he was the second coming of Apple's iconic leader, and the book only confirmed my suspicions. Biggest myth debunked in the book: Dorsey did not invent Twitter.
Excellent read.
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23 of 28 people found the following review helpful
By
Kcorn
TOP 100 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on November 5, 2013
Format: Kindle Edition
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2 Comments
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Author Nick Bilton conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with both current and past employees at Twitter, as well as their friends and even competitors at other companies. All four co-founders of the company agreed to be interviewed - and so did board members (past and present). I've read plenty about the history of the company and still found some surprising information in this book.
In addition to interviews, Bilton turned to Twitter itself to help fact check Twitter's history and the varied personalities behind the company. He also pored through thousands of online photos, videos, and tweets. If conversations with key players revealed significantly different recollections, trails of info found on Twitter could often set the record straight. A smart move on the author's part - scrutinizing how the founders used Twitter - right down to tweets on the exact days and times when certain pivotal events occurred.
From the first pages, I found myself drawn to the details of the power plays and personalities vividly chronicled by Bilton. The first section focuses on Twitter's founders: Evan Williams, Noah Glass, Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone. All of them diverse and fascinating. Williams, the farm boy who came to California and taught himself code. Noah Glass, who opens a magazine and realizes he lives in an apartment directly across from Williams (talk about coincidence) and introduces himself by yelling, "Hey, Blogger!" at Williams. Then there is Jack Dorsey, , the "invisible man" who had a significant speech impediment but didn't let that stop him from eventually becoming so successful that he won Wall Street Journal's 2012 "Innovator of the Year Award" in technology.Read more ›
In addition to interviews, Bilton turned to Twitter itself to help fact check Twitter's history and the varied personalities behind the company. He also pored through thousands of online photos, videos, and tweets. If conversations with key players revealed significantly different recollections, trails of info found on Twitter could often set the record straight. A smart move on the author's part - scrutinizing how the founders used Twitter - right down to tweets on the exact days and times when certain pivotal events occurred.
From the first pages, I found myself drawn to the details of the power plays and personalities vividly chronicled by Bilton. The first section focuses on Twitter's founders: Evan Williams, Noah Glass, Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone. All of them diverse and fascinating. Williams, the farm boy who came to California and taught himself code. Noah Glass, who opens a magazine and realizes he lives in an apartment directly across from Williams (talk about coincidence) and introduces himself by yelling, "Hey, Blogger!" at Williams. Then there is Jack Dorsey, , the "invisible man" who had a significant speech impediment but didn't let that stop him from eventually becoming so successful that he won Wall Street Journal's 2012 "Innovator of the Year Award" in technology.Read more ›
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