the Onda

Jeremy Liew points to a piece in Tech Review on Twitter and Ev Williams that covers the birth of the service in a well thought-out feel-good kind of way.

I think I am developing a man-crush for Ev as a product guy.

Though I suspect the ambling style portrayed in the piece may drive me nuts, I can't help but respect the way in which he seems to have pulled two infectious content/communication projects out of the ashes of mediocre ideas. This guy would be worth his weight in gold to any VC-backed company looking to restart its failed me-too consumer website.

My favorite quote in the piece:

Just like Blogger, Twitter was a simple communications product salvaged from the impending implosion of a more complex project. In both cases, Williams didn't really know what he was doing. With both ventures, his genius--if that is the word--derived from what the English poet John Keats, in a letter to his brothers, called "negative capability": "that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."

Rings so true to being an entrepreneur and making things out of nothing that it almost makes me want to start reading poetry.

On another note, part of my fascination with Twitter (and all of the clones that it has inspired) is how it seems to have— in sitting at the intersection of communication and publishing— nailed what Jeremy refers to as "lightweight self expression for the general public." At Tabblo, I tried very hard to instill this discipline into our content creation experience, and failed repeatedly in the process. On good days I tell myself that this had to do with the fact that we were after a much more complex authoring experience (we wanted to make your stories to look like magazine layouts so you'd buy them as physical products), but I think deep down I've often wondered about my own acumen when it comes to "negative capability" and making key product decisions.