四年前，我在TED上，介绍了当时工作的公司Odeo。由于那次演讲，纽约时报为我们写了一大篇文章，然后它又带来了更多媒体的报道，吸引了更多关注。之后我决定要当这家公司的CEO——那之前我只是个顾问——并成功获得风险投资 同时招聘更多人才。
One of the guys I hired was engineer named Jack Dorsey,and a year later,we were trying todecide which way to go with Odeo .Jack presented an idea that he had been thinking aroundwith for a number of years based around sending simple status and updates . So we kind ofput the two into together .in the eraly 2006,we launched Twitter as a side project to Odeo.
我招了一名叫Jack Dorsey的工程师，当一年后我们商量Odeo的发展方向时，Jack提出了一个他捉摸了好几年的点子基本上就是个能向朋友们发送简单消息的想法。Odeo当时也在探索短信服务，所以我们差不多是想将他们两结合在一起。2006年初，作为Odeo的一个业余项目，Twitter项目开始进行。
Now,it is hard to justify doing a side project at a start up where focus is so critical .But I hadactuallly launched Blogger as a side projet to my previous company thinking that it was so littlething we do on the side .And it ended up taking over not only the company but my life for thenext five or six years .So i learned to kind of follow hunches even though you cant necessarilyjustify them or know where they are going to go .And that 's kind of what is happenking withtwitter time after time .SO for those of you unfamiliar ,Twitter is based around very simple.seemingly trivial concept:you say what you are doing in 140 characters or less .And peoplewho are interested in you get those updates .If they are really interested,they get the updatedas a text message on their cell phone .
现在很难说搞业余项目是不是个好主意，因为对于初创型企业，专注是至关重要的。 但事实上，我在前一家公司推出的Blogger服务，也是一个业余项目。我当时想这只不过是个随便搞一下的小玩意。结果它不但占据了整个公司 也占据了我之后五、六年的生活。从中我学会了跟随直觉，尽管你不知道它是否正确，也不知道它会发展成什么样子。 这种情况又一次发生在了Twitter身上。那么，对于那些不熟悉Twitter的人，它基于一个非常简单，甚至微不足道的概念。你用不超过140个字说自己在做什么，对你感兴趣的人就会收到这些消息。如果真的十分感兴趣，他们甚至可以通过短信在手机上获得这些信息。
