On August 23, 1999 a startup company by the name of Pyra Labs started a service called Blogger.  Blogger was a service that directly competed with Xanga.  Pyra Labs was started by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan.

About four years after launching, Google bought out Pyra Labs and hired the team.  Williams himself did not stick around Google for long because he decided to start another startup company known as Twitter.  Twitter is known as a “micro-blogging” service.

As part of the 10th year anniversary, the Blogger team at Google is promising their users a bunch of new features.  Although the new features have not been revealed yet, the company said that they have listened to a lot of the feedback that was given about the service.

One of the biggest problems with Blogger today is spam abuse.  Signing up and setting up a blog using the service is so easy that spammers can quickly take charge.  Last year, Sophos an anti-virus company estimated that Blogger accounts for 2% of all malware on the web.

During the week, Sara Williams tweeted about her new born baby.  She had the baby with her husband and Twitter CEO Evan Williams.  To write about what was going on, she used text messaging to notify Twitter about the updates.

Below are some of the messages that both Evan and Sara tweeted.

Evan Williams:
Aug 11th 12:10 PM: Operation Baby Launch continues on track, though a bit too slowly in my opinion. That’s usually the case with big launches though.
Aug 11th 3:55 PM:  “Yes! @sara gave birth to a perfect baby boy. Both are well. 8 pounds, 21 inches! Smiles all around.”
Aug 12th 4:10 PM: “Thx for all the well wishes! Mom, baby, and dad are in the hospital, feeding, recovering, occasionally sleeping…all generally amazed.”

Sara Williams
Aug 10th 11:46 PM: “Dear Twitter, My water broke. It wasn’t like Charlotte in Sex and the City. Now, timing contractions on an iPhone app.”
Aug 11th 1:37 AM:  “The Contraction Tracker was fun until the contractions got painful.”
Aug 11th 4:11 AM: “Admitted to hospital. Got the second-to-last room.”
Aug 11th 5:49 AM: “Epidural, yes please.”
Aug 11th 1:20 PM: “The heartbeat monitor soothes the silence of a room that will shortly be anything but silent.”
Aug 11th 5:12 PM: “@ev is changing the first diaper.”

After reading these messages, I realized how addictive Twitter really can be.  Especially if a woman can sit their tweeting during the whole childbirth process.

Twitter has a feature that is similar to Facebook’s “Friends You May Know” and LinkedIn’s “People You May Know.”  This feature has been very effective in terms of high-profile users getting a ton more followers.  To find out who Twitter is suggests for you, visit this website:
http://twitter.com/invitations/suggestions.

When users sign up, they are shown featured personalities such as The Guardian, Felicia Day, TechCrunch, CNN, NYT, Dell, and Rainn Wilson.  Twitter started endorsing certain personalities in mid-January.  The Guardian went from about 4,000 followers to 66,000 in about a month.  Felicia Day went from 20,000 to 83,000.  TechCrunch went from 41,000 to 111,000.  The New York Times jumped to 145,000.

“The reason we created this feature is because lots of people sign up to Twitter but aren’t following anyone, so we’re trying to help get them started,” stated Williams in a comment on Brook Bayne’s blog.

Many people believe that this interferes with Twitter’s organic growth.  The suggested user system wasn’t exactly ideal accoring to Stone.  “Right now it’s sort of like staff picks at your local bookstore,” stated Stone in an e-mail with the L.A. Times. “Later, we hope to make this smarter.”

It won’t be done for a while because improving suggested users aren’t exactly the highest on the priority list.  Although I think this is pretty important because it seems like the friends of Twitter benefit from the suggested users while the rest get shafted.