> We loved this idea of one-button publishing, we loved this idea of collaboration, we loved this idea of being anywhere and being able to share what was happening. That was the idea.
> And I think the most beautiful and also sometimes uncomfortable aspect of Twitter is... we really learned what it wanted to be. And the people helped create it. Like everything that we hold sacred now—the hashtag, the @-symbol, the retweet—those were not invented by me or the company. Those were things that we discovered—that we discovered people using.
> And we just observed it. And we noticed what they were trying to do. They were trying to talk with one another. They were trying to collect tweets around topics, with a hashtag.
(re the emergence of the @-symbol)
re the hashtag and the @-symbol
> And again, that spread. All we did was make it easier. We made it more accessible, we enabled everyone to do it. With the @-symbol we made a page that collected all mentions of your name. With the hashtag we allowed people to search immediately, so you could tap on the keyword and you would see everyone tweeting about that specific hashtag.
> These things were just emergent behaviors which we didn't predict, and they became the lifeblood of the service.
> I don't think we could plan for it. I don't think we could necessarily build for that. Someone said recently that Twitter was discovered. And I think what's behind all that is that it hits something foundational, it his something essential.
> And... my cofounder Biz likes to say that Twitter can never be uninvented. It's here, it changed everything, and the use of it has been revolutionary. It's just this simple idea of: if you could text with the entire world, if you could actually reach anyone in the world or anyone could see what you're thinking—which I think is also the beautiful thing about text and the medium... you can actually get at someone's raw thoughts and anyone in the world can see that instantaneously. It becomes this subconscious, it becomes this global consciousness. And it gets to really deep places in society, and some of those places are...