Evan Williams (blogger)
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| Evan Williams | |
 Evan Williams at Twitter office, December 2007
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| Born | 31 March 1972 |
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| Residence | Berkeley, California, USA |
| Occupation | businessperson |
Evan Williams (born 31 March 1972[citation needed] in Nebraska) is an American entrepreneur who has founded several Internet companies.
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[edit] Early Life
Williams was born on a soybean, corn and cattle farm near Clarks, Nebraska, where he attended public school. He attended the University of Nebraska, but he never declared a major, and eventually dropped out. In the years that followed, Williams drifted around the country - Key West, Dallas, Austin - working various technology jobs and trying to pursue start-ups.
By 1996, he found himself back on the family farm, with little money and few prospects.
He took a marketing job at the media/conference firm O'Reilly Inc. and quickly became an independent contractor job writing computer code. He then did some freelance work with companies like Intel and Hewlett-Packard. [1].
[edit] Career
Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan co-founded Pyra Labs to make project management software. A note-taking feature spun off as Blogger, one of the first web applications for creating and managing blogs. Williams invented the term "blogger" and was instrumental in the popularization of the term "blog."[2] Pyra survived despite the departure of Hourihan and other employees, and was eventually acquired by Google on February 17, 2003[3].
He left Google in October 2004[4] to co-found Odeo, a podcasting company. In late 2006, Williams co-founded Obvious Corp with Biz Stone[5] and other former Odeo employees. Obvious Corp. has acquired all previous properties of Odeo, Inc., including Odeo and Twitter, another project started by Williams.
Obvious Corp. spun out Twitter into a separate company[6] in April 2007. Sonic Mountain acquired Odeo[7] in May 2007.
PC Magazine named Evan Williams, Paul Bausch and Hourihan, the Blogger team as People of the Year in 2004.
[edit] Criticism
In 2008, Williams replaced Jack Dorsey as Twitter's CEO even though under Dorsey's leadership Twitter made rapid and sudden gains in domestic unique viewers and pageviews [8].
[edit] Personal Life
Williams married Sara Morishige, a former Google HR specialist, on July 28, 2007 in the de Young Museum, San Francisco.[9] The couple is expecting their first child, a boy, in August 2009. [10]
[edit] References
- ^ Evan Williams and Biz Stone: The Twitter Revolution
- ^ Origins of "Blog" and "Blogger", American Dialect Society Mailing List (Apr. 20, 2008).
- ^ bloogleplications: Evan Williams announces Pyra acquisition
- ^ Evhead: next?
- ^ Birth of Obvious Corp
- ^ Twitter, Inc.
- ^ Odeo acquired by SonicMountain
- ^ [1]
- ^ Evan Williams fails to have a Twitter-free wedding
- ^ Can't decide how to Twitter that I'm going to be a dad.
[edit] External links
[edit] Interviews
- Interview with Evan Williams at cnet.com
- Interview with Evan Williams at SuicideGirls.com
- Interview with Evan Williams at techcrunch.com
- Interview with Evan Williams at fastcompany.com
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