Nick BiltonRezensionen

I like this kind of book. It’s an irreverent view of the geeks and misfits who created Twitter, perhaps the most used but least necessary software on the planet. That is, until Elon got a hold of it.

This book was first published in 2013 and so much has changed since then. Twitter (now X, in what has to be the silliest of rebrandings) has become perhaps less relevant than it ever was. Musk has seen the price fall through the floor and see value evaporate.

Fun book if you like business origin stories, but he really needs to do a follow-up, perhaps annually.

Good story, but the writing was a bit too choppy, Dragnet style, for me, and over the length of the book, it started feeling more like a list of facts than a book.

Really well-done true crime story. Bilton get is inside the heads of the key figures in the Silk Road story.

First time that I listened to a non-fiction audiobook. This was so well written that at times I had to remind myself that it's a true story and not a piece of fiction. This book was definitely riveting and I couldn't wait to listen to the next chapter.

This is a gossipy book, telling us about the founding story of Twitter. Nick Bilton takes a point of view but and gives a portrait of all the founders, warts and all.

My respect for Ev Williams & Biz Stone grew further after reading this. I was a bit disappointed with Jack Dorsey’s portrayal of being schemer and villain. May be a bit look into his side of the story on why he behaved that way, would have been nice. Like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos (in Bad Blood), Jack also has the imitation and influence of Steve Jobs in many of his manners and practices. But the sweet irony of the story is: Jack runs Twitter now full-time. I would love know what happened after Dick Costolo took over and how Jack came back to rein in Twitter.

Nevertheless, its a fantastic and racy read. This is my second book of Nick after the excellent American Kingpin and the fifth book to know more about Silicon Valley and its history.

A quick read and a very good thriller based on the real story of the Silk Road. Really enjoyed it.

Very insightful. I love Twitter and would like to know everything about it. This book is throughly researched. Nick is unbiased , but for a few he might across as if he hates Jack Dorsey.

Informative in a way but not what i expected. Guess i had my hopes a little too high

A well told story told in a fictional manner. Written in a simplistic manner with a riveting storyline.

Desde fuera, la red social Twitter parece ser la típica compañía sin problemas y afortunada asentada en Silicon Valley. Una historia más de una pequeña empresa tecnológica que acaba consiguiendo un éxito desmesurado: Un grupo de jóvenes programadores construyen una empresa con la esperanza de hacerse ricos y cambiar el mund o. Y lo consiguen.Pero Twitter no se creó de la manera que se nos ha vendido públicamente. Es, al contrario, una historia de traición, de inversores despiadados y de luchas de poder que acabaron con la expulsión de los fundadores de Twitter, de directores ejecutivos, de empleados, de inversoresy de miembros del consejo.Esta también una historia de fama. De influencia. De poder. De dinero. Es una historia, retratada por el periodista de The New York Times Nick Bilton, que define a una generación en la que los ingenieros de software se han convertido en celebridades de fama mundial.

Somewhat overtold/repetitive but still engaging story of the creator of Silk Road, the website where people could order drugs, guns, and poisons to be delivered through the mail and believe they’d stay anonymous. I learned that two of the main agents on the case used the opportunity to enrich themselves—one by stealing Bitcoin from a lower-level guy they arrested and another by selling information to the Dread Pirate Roberts who ran Silk Road. That they caught him at all ends up being a combination of his mistakes and the dedication of a couple of other, noncorrupt agents. The story is tightly focused on the Silk Road investigation, with only one story of a kid who died from the drugs it sold; we will never know many of its other impacts.

Narrative non-fiction that reads like a cybercrime thriller, this book tells the true story of Ross Ulbricht (aka Dread Pirate Roberts), creator of the Silk Road website (now defunct) on the dark net where drugs, weapons, body parts, and other contraband were offered for sale using Bitcoin virtual currency. It is a story of the rise and fall of the Silk Road, the transformation of mild-mannered college-educated Ulbricht into the head of a global criminal enterprise, and the government agents and agencies that brought him down.

The author pieces together a vast array of data from Ulbricht’s electronic trail, chat logs, photos, social media, courtroom transcripts, and interviews with family, friends, and participants (excluding Ulbricht) to assemble this riveting story. He does not use footnotes or specifics in documenting sources but provides a summary of all resources in the Appendix and does not identify where the quoted conversations originate.

The reader does not need detailed technical knowledge to appreciate this book. In fact, techies will probably want more detail than is provided. It is a fast-paced engrossing story that I found hard to put down.

It is a super entertaining book about people behind one of the greatest Internet startups of all time. Hatched as a side project and then pivot of podcasts website - Odeo, Twitter was at the right time in the right place, however not really ready for the exponential growth which was waiting for it.
Instead of focusing on Twitter as a product, the author focuses on people behind it, their backgrounds and relationships with each other. Of course when there are so much money and power involved friendships get broken and intrigues start. It is interesting to read how people change exposed to such things and what happens behind the scenes.
However, the story should be taken with the salt of grain as it looks like the author is a bit biased in favor of Ev and against Jack.
Moral of the book - people are feeling lonely. Twitter's initial idea was supposed to be the antidote for that. People are still lonely but at least they know "What's happening" faster.

This is a review of the book itself, not anything that the author has said outside of this book.

While this is a book that predicts a number of things that could happen in the future, the author forget about the qr codes they included in every chapter and the future of them. Those qr codes are meant to go to the author's website (which doesn't exist at the time of this review) and the app mentioned at the beginning doesn't exist anymore either.

Some of the things the author talked about has come true in 2022 which is very cool.

"Instead of our relying on professional editors to package a home page or produce a printed page, our online friends are now our de facto editors, providing a supply of news and information that is highly personalized and tailored to our interests. As a result, these relationships are much more than “social.” They are hugely influential."

When reading the footnotes, the links are either cut off (that may be due to my e-reader) or don't exist anymore (as it's been 13 years since some of those links were first published).

The first chapter is on the sex / porn industry, I think it's very bold to start on that chapter and if I were working on that book I would suggest for it to be moved to a later chapter so that readers get invested into the book earlier.

The author does mention what exact street they lived on (at the time of the writing), which I think is very weird and I hope they moved shortly before publishing. They also touch on points related to Christian and "the church" every once in a while which some readers may not like.

Overall it's an interesting book, which some people may laugh at and some may find interesting. It's not a book I would read again and the type of people that would enjoy this book may be very small.

"Fear of the new and fear of the unknown are common afflictions. At their worst, they can stunt or stop innovation. More commonly, though, this technology hypochondria—or technochondria, if you will—rattles a large part of the population, leading to a divide between those who rush forward with new experiences, fearful that they might miss something, and those whose fright leaves them feeling disoriented and left behind."

"what so many of us have trouble grasping—is how difficult it is to foresee exactly what changes a new technology ultimately will bring."

Detailed story

Good investigative work on one of the least known commerce sites on the dark net. Could not put it down!

Fantastic! I can't believe how fast I flew through this book.

A fast-paced read about the take-down of a young guy who thought he could save the world by selling drugs, guns, body parts and really, anything else illegal, on the "dark web". Ross Albright embraced the libertarian values that what you put in your body was your business, not the governments. He started out selling magic mushrooms that he grew in his apartment. From there the website escalated to the sale of anything illegal you could dream of, using Bitcon which could not be traced. The ABC agencies caught onto to the website early, and yet they could not uncover the person behind it.

A fast paced true-crime that had me reading late into the night.

This is a non-fiction book that reads like a thriller. Bilton does a great job of moving between characters and story lines and he has crafted an informative and entertaining book.

tells a little known story about the messy early years

Hatching Twitter follows the rise of Twitter through the lives of its founders and initial employees. As someone how has followed twitter since the beginning, I thought I knew the story but wow was I wrong. It turns out that there was far more power jockeying and boardroom backstabbing than I ever thought.

The way this story is told is also rather impressive. Rather than just being a telling of facts, you feel like you’re there with the characters in the rooms as ideas are brainstormed or things go right (or more often wrong).

Twitter has played an outsized role in my life. The first startup I worked at where I felt true ownership of my work was a platform to connect Twitter users with advertisers to make money (before promoted Tweets were a thing). I remember going to Twitters first (and only) conference, Chirp, right around when Twitter hit 140 employees. I remember sending out a sponsored tweet manually from a Rails console that someone paid $20k to send. I remember having lunch with coworkers and friends on the floor at a Twitter event while Will.i.am had discussions over us.

Twitter holds a number of great memories for me. While this book shed light on some of the darker sides of the company, it also left me feeling how important a part it was (is) for the founders - a feeling I could easily identify with.

It was o.k. I guess. Although since I knew how everything ended, that probably made is less suspenseful but I'm glad I read it or at least week of my life that this is what I was reading.

Ah, Silk Road -- the first "killer app" for cryptocurrency. While it's hard to really be sure of the truth in a relatively current criminal prosecution, this seems well researched and I'm reasonably confident broadly accurate. It was interesting how the lack of knowledge and biases of law enforcement made them blind to suspects -- thinking it required a huge amount of formal computer science education and programming skill to run a mediocre bulletin board site in >2010, etc.

Overall a good book and some insights into the psychology of the various characters. A little more exploration of the libertarian and cypherpunk roots, ties into the long-running battle for drug decriminalization, etc, might have been nice for context, but overall quite good. And very sad.

Normally, books have protagonists and antagonists, and you can at least empathize with some of the characters -- in fiction or non-fiction. With this book, you end up solidly hating everyone involved. It's amazing that Twitter exists today if even 10% of this book is accurate.

A very interesting story about the person who set up a huge online store for purchasing illicit drugs, fake ids, weapons and even body parts. I would have given a better star rating but the writing style was so awful that I almost didn’t finish the book.

So many lessons to be learned here.

"Don't hire your friends" might be one.

I think, though, that the troubles that assailed the leadership of Twitter were due as much to lack of good communication as anything else. But I get ahead of myself.

Four young men essentially founded Twitter. The original germ of an idea was Noah Glass's, but it evolved through the work of all four and other employees of the Odeo company. Odeo was the child of Ev Williams, who had made millions when he created Blogger and eventually sold it to Google. It was Ev who financed Twitter for years, while its problems were ironed out and Twitter accounts skyrocketed. Ev paid out of pocket and found investors during those early years when nobody even thought about how it was eventually going to make money.

As Twitter gained in popularity and success, however, it was in danger of being run into the ground by an incompetent CEO. Three of the four co-founders were ousted by the company they created - or rather by forces within that company, and the fourth left of his own volition.

Ev was the only one who had previously run a company, and so was competent if not expert in the job. The incredible rapid growth of Twitter would have crushed an experienced CEO, however. Problems with the software and a lack of agreement on the direction the company needed to take led to the ousters. But it was more than that.

In each case, the removal of the person was the subject of many secret meetings. When the move was announced all legal issues were tied up so there was no recourse. In each case, the person was allowed to continue doing what he had been doing all along, even though many disagreed with the direction, until the boom fell.

I think the disagreements should have been openly acknowledged and a time period to change course offered. Then, if that didn't work out, the board could remove the person. It seems to me that this would have been the ethical way to manage the company. The secrecy led to resentment and in one case the return of Jack, who brought back with him all the reasons he was kicked out in the first place.

It is clear that the writer, through his interviews and reading of thousands of messages and other documents, came to favor Ev Williams. The book is more a story of Ev than of anyone else, and he comes across favorably, except that his very real faults are discussed. On the other hand, Jack comes across as the primary villain of the piece. Because Jack also founded Square, one of my favorite things, I find myself a little distressed.

I suspect that if I knew the full story behind any of the mega-startups in recent years I would find similar stories, however. This much was suggested by Bilton in an interview I heard on the radio. I would probably hate them all. I think, though, of Ev and wife Sara's goal with their children: that they raise them so that they never "act this way".

All the cuteness that is Twitter hides an ugly past.