Last nite saw the Not Quite Hollywood : Aussie Ozpolitation doco which was really good (made me want to watch Mad Max - original ere or trilogy with more seeds - again) Really had no idea of the amount of 70’s + 80’s films that came out of Australia, well (i knew the quantity) didn’t grok the laissez faire bloodntits type genre (good 15 mins of tarantino on screen goin crazy bout each of the movies in detail). And the stunt work even had Dennis Hopper amazed at his craziest. Started Sunday morn enjoying British S1E5 demons (”Mina and Galvin’s investigation of a murder lead them to believe that Luke is in danger. Whilst Luke is lying low Mina starts having visions of a winged beast.”)… while those more lucky traverse the European continent (there was like 2 secs of rain out my window this morn, that didnt last) now I’m listening to Crystal Castles - good post daft punkish album grab it ere that Pitchfork had at #15 for 08 or listen to the group on hympem.com

“The bastard child of the Knife’s Silent Shout and Simian Mobile Disco’s Attack Decay Sustain Release, it fused together the spangliest portions of electronic music’s nascent 8-bit scene with vinegary attitude, dirty basslines, and some of the freshest programming work this side of Max Tundra. “Courtship Dating”! “Untrust Us”! “Air War”! For pretty much a whole year, this goddamned thing was tough to deny, even when it felt like the people who made it weren’t.”

While greading’n’twhirling @nickhac’s tweet air_fluttered by on the history of twitter. Picked up a few new pieces of info but am still infected (guess coz i’m experiencing it first hand, hehe) by Dave McClure’s anti-hero rant on the myth of entrepreneurship. Here’s a little test, read Dave’s piece, then the twitter one, folloed by an alternative story arc for a book which I’d like to pick up which I found via a “David Foster Wallace” google news atom feed alert, titled “Losing Everything“.

While people will say luck is for those that work hard, and the economics of being a writer vs a Mountain View entrepreneur are fundamentally different, the rollercoaster as Dave calls it, makes the difference between individuals alot closer than magazine stories and blog posts make out. In reality it’s a self selection thing too, in so far as there is very little entrepreneurial research, and media that covers “startups” for example, are going to cover the success stories and blowouts, not the volume in the middle. (eg businesses that survive, run at breakeven, or morph into single contract professional services etc, ones that are quietly shut down, and so on)

There are so many outliers with the Twitter story - it’s hard to extrapolate it as “normal” in starting a business. It may be an exception that proves the entrepreneurial illusion but even then it’s more about Odeo/Obvious Corp spun out one of its engineers ideas to focus on a totally different business to the one they had been funded for. (podcasting) Even the previous venture - Pyra Labs which begat a cutdown Blogger, was about a content management system while Odeo and Twitter had nothing in common other than people and their capital searching for a hypergrowth home. So it’s more an innovative incubation story than an entrepreneurial one, that is if you are following the Evan Williams perspective, than the Jack Dorsey one. Here’s some top of mind not necessarily accurate gutfeels about what makes Twitter different from the everyman entrepreneur tryin to cop a funding :

- Most entrepreneurs without any domain experience in the area they were looking to invest millions of dollars in (Podcasting, and Odeo) would not have raised money. But obviously if u win big on your previous venture (Starting Blogger, selling to Google) u r more likely to get a backer.

- If you do get funded for area X, the last thing investors want u to do is build Y. So for most funded entrepreneurs u wouldnt get the chance to build twitter in the spare time from odeo. So in most cases twitter would have been stillborn. The parties ability to successfully spin out twitter was very well done, and obvs didnt hurt that investors could be paid back a large % of their money from the entrepreneur personally (again that would normally not ever happen, but different circumstances)

- Most 20% projects as Google has proven and recently killed go nowhere

- Ironically in retrospect, twitter and microblogging make total linear sense as a progression from blogging, and the founder of Blogger; The history books ultimately will remember that, not that there was a podcasting venture in between, and that the twitter idea came from a different party to the blogger one.

What Twitter may be as an academic case study, is as a Second/Third Time Entrepreneurship slash First Album Hit, Second Album Blues, Third Album reclaim success; It depicts Evan Williams evolving from “The” Founder/Creator to the Enabler/Funder/Manager; Being GOOG cashed up via capital and respect from engineering and investment markets allowed twitter to succeed. All while dodging an MP3 podcasting Itunes bullet via long code 5char’ message idea formerly known as twttr. OK I’m off to Rye. Didn’t know tweets initially didnt have a character limit… there ya go, every day - learning….

140 Characters.com : “We struggled with a codename and a product name. “It’s FriendStalker!” joked @Crystal, our most prolific user. The userbase was limited entirely to the company and our immediate family. No one from a major company of any kind was allowed in. For months, we were in Top Secret Alpha because of competing products like the now-defunkt Dodgeball. We operated using a “long code”, or a full 10-digit phone number linked to a small-potatoes gateway. The original product name / codename “twttr” was inspired by Flickr and the fact that American SMS shortcodes are five characters. We prototyped with “89887″ as our shortcode. We later changed to “40404″ for ease of use and memorability. Twttr probably had about 50 users in the long code days.”

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