A brief history. There was a little company called Blogger. They ran out of money during the first Internet bust. One of their founders, Evan Williams, was left to keep servers running. When we had lunch one day, way back then, Ev showed me a pile of books on a coding language called Java. He was reading those so he could figure out how to keep Blogger up. Then the Internet economy came back. Google bought Blogger. Evan had the money, freedom, and clout to start Odeo, out of which Twitter spun, and then flew. And today, Twitter had a very big IPO that may have never happened if Evan hadn’t been able to read those Java books really fast. Twitter is the biggest tech IPO since Facebook. And its first day on the market went a whole lot better.

+ Twitter’s opening day is providing quite a bounce for its shareholders. But this is nothing compared to the first boom. Twitter’s big morning wouldn’t have come close to cracking the top 25 first day gains of 1999. Let’s put it this way. Twitter is no Ask Jeeves.

+ “There’s some sophisticated, supple, and even revolutionary technology at work. Appreciating Twitter’s machinery is key to understanding how an idea so simple changed the way millions of people advertise their existences to the world.” Paul Ford on the hidden technology that makes Twitter huge.

+ Chartgirl’s guide to who’s making how much.

+ Sam Biddle on the guy who pretends he invented Twitter.

+ If I had known it was gonna be this big, I probably would have worked a bit harder on my first two tweets.