Raves and Reviews

"In the end, Bilton’s book does a service. In a society that idolizes tech founders, it is healthy to be reminded that they are so often ordinary young men who just happened to be the ones pulling the lever when three bars came up."
Tim Wu, The Washington Post

"Bilton tells the story with verve. "
Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian

"Bilton, a reporter for The New York Times, does an admirable job recreating the boardroom dramas that threatened to destroy it in its infancy. Interviewing all four of the founders as well as other major players in Twitter’s creation, Bilton offers the best look yet at how the famously troubled company survived to go public."
Casey Newton, The Verge

"Bilton's excellent book rivals The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon in its scope 
and unflinching honesty. Through copious research and interviews, Bilton weaves together the heretofore untold story of one of the most influential companies of our times."
Phil Simon, Huffington Post

"One of the book’s great qualities is that it shines light not just on conflicting personalities, but how those personalities influenced what Twitter is, and what it was and what it might have been."
Mat Honan, Wired

"The story behind the most richly anticipated tech IPO since Facebook in May 2012 is rife with Byzantine-like intrigue, character clashes and broken dreams."
Jon Swartz, USA Today

Additional Nick Bilton Info!

Wanna learn more about Nick Bilton?

Here are links to his webpage,Wikipedia page, NY Times Blog, and of course, his Twitter!

http://www.nickbilton.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bilton

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/author/nick-bilton/?_r=0

https://twitter.com/nickbilton

Also, want to hear him talk about his book, Hatching Twitter? Then click the link below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEQSHQSksqM

Even better, wanna buy the book?!?! Amazon has got your back!

http://www.amazon.com/Hatching-Twitter-Story-Friendship-Betrayal/dp/1591847087/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418984687&sr=8-1&keywords=hatching+twitter

Sources

Nicholas Gane and David Beer, "Network," in New Media: The Key Concepts (2008).

Henry Jenkins et al., “Where Web 2.0 went wrong,” Spreadable Media (2013).

Ramesh Srinivasan, "Bridges between cultural and digital worlds in Revolutionary Egypt," The Information Society 29 (2013), 49-60.

Susan Dominus, "The Affluencer," The New York Times (2008). Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/magazine/02zalaznick-t.html?pagewanted=all.

Conclusion: Did Bilton Convince Me?

McKayla Maroney is not impressed...

Overall when just simply looking over at how the novel introduced the facts about how Twitter gained new followers after new affluencers joined the site, one would be very cautious to believe this because there are no outside sources being quoted or charts presented. Solely based upon the contents of the book, did Nick Bilton convince me that celebrities were the one's that made Twitter famous? Not a chance. However, this can be explained by the novel simply wanting to communicate the history of Twitter and not a specific argument about it. That's it. After doing brief research, one can find that Twitter did actually gain a statistically significant amount of new Twitter followers after new celebrities, or affluencers joined. This can be seen by charts from outside sources showing the growth of new Twitter followers which match up very closely with the time frames presented in the book as to when big celebrities started using the site. One must also keep in mind that the author, Nick Bilton did do an enormous amount of research in order to write this book as he was able to access official Twitter documents that may have had this statistical data that validates this idea. 

The Power of the Public Voice

Although there seems to be many instances in the book that mention the impact that affluencers had on Twitter’s success, people may also want to point out that it may not be solely the celebrity affluencers that led to Twitter’s success, it was also the use of Twitter by average civilians overseas in order to help the mobilization of protesters when it came to political affairs. In the book, in mentions that in June of 2009 there was an unusual spike in Twitter activity in Iran following the Iranian Presidential election. This was because Iranian citizens had suspected that the votes were rigged so they joined Twitter to voice their disapproval and to mobilize the protesters. According to Bilton (2013), during this time “Iran-related hashtags became the top trending topics on Twitter” (p. 207).

However once again, this claim can be backed up by a chart. In June of 2009, almost 10% of all new Twitter profiles were made in Iran.

People may have this opinion about Twitter’s success because this is not the only use of Twitter across the seas that has been used to bring average citizens together for a political cause. Twitter has also been heavily used in Cairo, Egypt in order for average citizens to voice their political opinions and protest the Egyptian government. One way in which Twitter is used in this way is in an event called “Tweet Up” in which the citizens of Egypt gather together and send in tweets under the hashtag #tweetnadwa that according to Srinivasan (2013), “reflect questions, comments, and thoughts related to the session…and celebrate the speakers, who are seen as brave revolutionaries.” (p. 53) Twitter is also utilized on the streets in Cairo where people were protesting the Egyptian government all while tweeting live updates of the protests in order to pass on information to other people about what was happening on the front line.

Although there is no mention of there being any significant spike in new Twitter users during the protests of the Iranian Presidential election, this can help generate the idea that Twitter gained a substantial amount followers overseas for uses of political activism because Twitter is one of the few mass communication tools that they have.

Correlation? Or Nah?

One question we might have is how do we know that the spike in Twitter traffic correlates with the new presence of celebrities on Twitter? There could be a substantial lag in time between a celebrity joining the site and their fans finding out about this, however is thought is debunked by the idea of “timeless time.” Gane and Beer (2008) explain that this is “an accelerated time that is unique to the new media age. It is a computerized time created by machines that operate and communicate with each other at speeds far beyond the sensory perceptions of their users” (p. 21). Basically, once a celebrity joins Twitter and tweets, that information is made available to the public in an instant through the use of real time tweets constantly being posted on the site. Assuming that the celebrity’s Twitter is made public to everyone, anyone has the ability to find out which celebrities are joining Twitter and they can in return join Twitter in an instant. 

Meet the Affluencers

In the book, there are many big celebrity names that are mentioned that had joined Twitter. One of the first big-name celebrities to join Twitter was former NBA star, Shaquille O’Neal. When he joined Twitter in November of 2008, Twitter was only 2 years old and was still only a little-known social media site to the rest of the world. According to Bilton (2013), this was good news because “where the celebrities went, their fans followed” (p. 170).

Although the book offers no statistical data to back up this claim, after some thorough investigation, there is data that can be found online in regards to Twitter’s growth over the years.

In the chart seen above, in November of 2008, there was a significant increase in the number of Twitter users in the United States. However more significantly, there was a tremendous spike in the number of Twitter users worldwide in December of 2008.

Another affluencer who seemed to have a significant impact on the popularity of Twitter was actor Ashton Kutcher. What set Ashton Kutcher apart from other celebrities as a user of Twitter at the time, was that he personally advocated for the company and would tell others how much he loved Twitter. Although there is again no statistical information presented in the book, there is another chart available online that measures the amounts of new Twitter users online.

 From January of 2009, which was when Kutcher first joined Twitter, to just before April 2009, there was a staggering increase in the rate of new Twitter users per month. In January there was about 1.2 million new sign-ups and in March there were about 8 million new sign-ups that month.

It is also because of Ashton Kutcher’s public use of Twitter that another affluencer decided to join the site, this time Oprah, one of the world’s most famous woman wanted in on the site. Before Oprah had even heard about Twitter, Ashton Kutcher and CNN were engaged in a very public race to see who could get one million followers first on Twitter. After Oprah had heard about this race, she started asking people about Twitter and was interested in getting her own account. The result was having Oprah dedicate a whole episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to Twitter and having her send her first “tweet” live on the air.

According to Bilton (2013), this first live tweet created a “tsunami of sign-ups” and “as the show went on, Oprah’s viewers started signing up for the site in droves…more people joined Twitter on that day than on any single day in the site’s history---nearly half a million people in the first twenty-four hours” (p. 188).

Again, although there is again no concrete evidence presented in the book, there is shown to be a significant growth in users from April to May of 2009 following a dramatic decrease in the amount of new users per month.