How AOL Instant Messenger Inspired Twitter | Joe Rogan and Jack Dorsey

When you look back at emerging social media, like we go all the way back to MySpace, right? MySpace, you got Tom. Tom was sitting there in your top eight and, you know, people would like post music that they liked and it was never political. It was very often very surface and for comics, it was a great way to promote shows and it was an interesting way to see things. But it was like the seed that became Twitter or Facebook or any of these other things. That was one of them. I think we, at least for us, like we got more of our roots from AOA and some Messenger and ICQ. Mm, ICQ. Because it was, you know, you remember the status message where you said like I'm in a meeting or I'm listening to this music or I'm watching a movie right now. That was the inspiration. And what we took from that was being able to like, if you could do that from anywhere, I'm not bound to a desk, but you could do that from anywhere and you could do it from your phone and you could just be roaming around and say, you know, I'm at Joe Rogan's studio right now. That is cool. I don't need my computer. I'm not bound to this, chained to this desk. I can do it from anywhere. And then the other aspect of Insta Messenger was of course chat. So one of the things that the status would do is you might say like, you know, I'm listening to Kendrick Lamar right now and I might hit you up on chat and say like, what do you think of the new album? But now it's all public. So it's just, everyone can see it. That's the biggest difference. And that to me is what Twitter is. MySpace was, it was profiles and, you know, people organized around these profiles and this network that developed between people and that is Facebook. Facebook optimized the hell out of that and they scaled the world. We were something very different. We started with that simple status and then people wanted to talk about it and we decided that it should be on the same surface. It shouldn't be subservient to the status. It should be part of that flow and that's what makes Twitter so fluid.