garry’s subposthaven

Very interesting to dig into these -- Of note: Jim Clark of Netscape did a 90 / 10 split with Marc Andreesen.

Incredible -- a life's photographic work found in an attic, now perhaps someday to be shown in the world's greatest galleries.

More at the official blog. They are also funding a documentary about this amazing story on kickstarter.

Hat tip Thomas Bass

Evan Williams himself writes:

We launched it nine months before -- to a whimper. By the time SXSW 2007 rolled around, we were starting to grow finally and it seemed like all of our users (which were probably in the thousands) were going to Austin that year. So, we did two things to take advantage of the emerging critical mass:

1) We created a Twitter visualizer and negotiated with the festival to put flat panel screens in the hallways. This is something they'd never done before, but we didn't want a booth on the trade show floor, because we knew hallways is where the action was. We paid $11K for this and set up the TVs ourselves. (This was about the only money Twitter's *ever* spent on marketing.)

2) We created an event-specific feature, where, you could text 'join sxsw' to 40404. Then you would show up on the screens. And, if you weren't already a Twitter user, you'd automatically be following a half-dozen or so "ambassadors," who were Twitter users also at SXSW. We advertised this on the screens in the hallways. (I don't know how many people signed up this way -- my recollection is not a lot.)