Evan Williams and Biz Stone of Twitter
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This is what I ultimately find most inspiring about the Twitter phenomenon. We are living through the worst economic crisis in generations, with apocalyptic headlines threatening the end of capitalism as we know it, and yet in the middle of this chaos, the engineers at Twitter headquarters are scrambling to keep the servers up, application developers are releasing their latest builds, and ordinary users are figuring out all the ingenious ways to put these tools to use. There's a kind of resilience here that is worth savoring. The weather reports keep announcing that the sky is falling, but here we are--millions of us--sitting around trying to invent new ways to talk to one another.
Johnson is the author of six books, most recently The Invention of Air, and a co-founder of the local-news website outside.in
What Are You Doing?
Although Twitter trails other Web giants, its explosive growth over the past year means it could soon catch up
[This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine or PDF.]
April '08 Visitors (in millions) April '09 Visitors (in millions) Change Google 120.79 131.60 9% facebook 22.48 71.29 217% amazon.com 47.26 50.37 7% myspace.com 58.75 54.60 -7% twitter 1.22 17.10 1,298%Source: Nielsen