Dorsey had nurtured the basic idea of Twitter for years — a site that would be like AOL Instant Messenger’s “away message” for anywhere, or “a more ‘live’ LiveJournal,” as he put it in a post on Flickr. But Williams, who created Blogger and sold it to Google for millions, came to see something else in Twitter: To him, its potential lay in its ability to create a running record of what was going on in the outside world. Dorsey was insistent that it was the latter: “You’re talking about your status as you look at the fire.”To Dorsey, the fact that Twitter creates a record of the world would be an incidental byproduct of all this status-sharing. He posted it to Twitter with a brief caption. Dorsey and Williams were correct to identify this as a conflict, even if they could not design or engineer it away.

---