Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone discuss the social microblogging platform with Aspen Institute President and CEO Walter Isaacson.
Bio
Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson is the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute. He has been the Chairman and CEO of CNN and the Managing Editor of Time Magazine.
He is the author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003) and of Kissinger: A Biography (1992) and is the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986). His biography of Albert Einstein - Einstein: His Life and Universe - was released in April 2007.
Isaacson was born on May 20, 1952, in New Orleans. He is a graduate of Harvard College and of Pembroke College of Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
He began his career at the Sunday Times of London and then the New Orleans Times-Picayune/States-Item. He joined Time Magazine in 1978 and served as a political correspondent, national editor and editor of new media before becoming the magazine's 14th managing editor in 1996. He became Chairman and CEO of CNN in 2001, and then president and CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003.
He was appointed after Hurricane Katrina to be the vice-chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. He is on the Board of Directors of United Airlines, Tulane University, the National Constitution Center, and he is chairman of the board of Teach for America.
Biz Stone
Biz Stone is co-founder of Twitter, the one-tomany network that is changing the way people communicate around the world. He has previously helped build other popular social media services such as Xanga, Blogger, and Odeo. And went on to publish two books about the origins and social significance of blogging: Who Let the Blogs Out? and Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content.
Stone teaches an annual master class at Oxford's Saïd Business School. He shares much of what he has learned over the past decade as an advisor to startups such as answer community Fluther.com, travel service Trazzler.com which he co-founded, content encouragement service Plinky.com, and the non-profit organization Justgive.org.
Evan Williams
Evan Williams is chairman and chief product officer of Twitter, Inc. Previously, he was co-founder and CEO of Pyra Labs, who created Blogger in 1999. In 2003, Blogger was purchased by Google, where Williams worked as a product and engineering manager until late 2004.
Williams was raised on a farm in Nebraska and dropped out of college as a sophomore, prior starting his first Internet company in 1994.
Publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. ARPANET's purpose was to conduct research into computer networking in order to provide a secure and survivable communications system in case of war. As the network quickly expanded, academics and researchers in other fields began to use it as well. In 1971 the first program for sending e-mail over a distributed network was developed; by 1973, the year international connections to ARPANET were made (from Britain and Norway), e-mail represented most of the traffic on ARPANET. The 1970s also saw the development of mailing lists, newsgroups and bulletin-board systems, and the TCP/IP communications protocols, which were adopted as standard protocols for ARPANET in 1982–83, leading to the widespread use of the term Internet. In 1984 the domain name addressing system was introduced. In 1986 the National Science Foundation established the NSFNET, a distributed network of networks capable of handling far greater traffic, and within a year more than 10,000 hosts were connected to the Internet. In 1988 real-time conversation over the network became possible with the development of Internet Relay Chat protocols (seechat). In 1990 ARPANET ceased to exist, leaving behind the NSFNET, and the first commercial dial-up access to the Internet became available. In 1991 the World Wide Web was released to the public (via FTP). The Mosaic browser was released in 1993, and its popularity led to the proliferation of World Wide Web sites and users. In 1995 the NSFNET reverted to the role of a research network, leaving Internet traffic to be routed through network providers rather than NSF supercomputers. That year the Web became the most popular part of the Internet, surpassing the FTP protocols in traffic volume. By 1997 there were more than 10 million hosts on the Internet and more than 1 million registered domain names. Internet access can now be gained via radio signals, cable-television lines, satellites, and fibre-optic connections, though most traffic still uses a part of the public telecommunications (telephone) network. The Internet is widely regarded as a development of vast significance that will affect nearly every aspect of human culture and commerce in ways still only dimly discernible.
I colleague of mine did very good research on this for her master thesis. We are both political communication/strategy grad students so we have a pretty good understanding of this. Contrary to what most people believe most the tweets had nothing to do with it the Green revolution.Research shows that Iranian telecoms could't handle the SMS traffic. Further most of the reports were from people outside the region of the events. These guys are asshole for not checking down this hypothesis in its tracks. I'm sure they have seem the actual stats so they know the truth but choose not to albeit for advertising..
It was tyrannical govt and pissed off individuals who fueled the revolt and lead the charge Not twitter.
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member. 
