Twitter

Did you know that the creators of Twitter once worked at Google? In 2005, Biz Stone and his co-worker Evan Williams left Google to start a podcasting business called Odeo. A lot of investors were interested in their business. Unfortunately, Biz and Evan weren't passionate about it. They knew they couldn't work on a project that didn't interest them, so they decided to have a hackathon. For two weeks, the small group of Odeo employees worked in pairs and tried to think of a new idea for a business. Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey came up with an idea for a micro-blogging service. They thought it would be fun to have an online service that let you see a short, simple status update of what your friends were doing. They built a prototype and presented it to the Odeo team. The team wasn't that excited, but after a while they decided that it was the best idea. They began to work together on building Twitter.