Here’s a piece of startup history that is probably not widely known outside of tech firms themselves: the first versions of popular Android apps like Twitter were created by Google itself. This revelation got here through latest podcast with Twitter’s former senior director of product management, Sara Beykpour, now co-founder of artificial intelligence startup Particle.
In the podcast hosted by Lightspeed partner Michael Mignano, Beykpour reflects on his role in Twitter’s history. She explains how she began working at Twitter in 2009, initially as a tools engineer, when the company only had about 75 people. Beykpour later began working on Twitter on mobile devices, around the time that other third-party apps were gaining popularity on other platforms resembling BlackBerry and iOS. One of them, Loren Brichter’s Tweetie, was even acquired by Twitter and became the basis of its first official iOS app.
As for the Twitter app for Android, which comes from Google, Beykpour said.
The Twitter client for Android is “a demo app that Google built and gave us,” she said on the podcast. “They did it with all the popular social media apps at the time: Foursquare… Twitter… they all looked the same at first because Google wrote them all.”
Mignano interjected: “Wait, then step back; Explain this. So Google wanted companies to adopt Android to build apps for them?”
“Yes, exactly,” Beykpour replied.
Twitter then acquired the Android app built by Google and continued to develop it. She said Beykpour was the company’s second Android engineer.
In fact, Google detailed its work on the Twitter client for Android in a blog post from 2010but most news reports on time it didn’t credit the app with Google’s work, which made it a forgotten piece of web history. In Google’s post, the company explains the way it implemented Android best practices in the Twitter app. Beykpour told TechCrunch that the writer of the post, Virgil Dobjanschi, was a lead software engineer.
“If we had questions, we were supposed to ask them,” he recalled.
Beykpour also shared other stories from Twitter’s early days. For example, she worked on Twitter’s Vine video app (after returning to Twitter after working at Secret) and was under pressure to launch Vine on Android before Instagram launched its video product. She met that deadline by launching Vine about two weeks before the Instagram video, she said.
The latter “significantly” impacted Vine’s performance and, in response to Beykpour, led to the popular app’s demise.
“That was the day the writing was on the wall,” she said, though it took years for Vine to finally shut down.
On Twitter, Beykpour led the shutdown of Vine – an app still so beloved that even Twitter/X’s latest owner, Elon Musk holds teasing about bringing it back. Beykpour, nonetheless, believes that Twitter made the right decision in selecting Vine, noting that the app lacks growth and is expensive to take care of. He acknowledges that others may see it in a different way, perhaps arguing that Vine didn’t have sufficient resources or management support. Ultimately, nonetheless, the shutdown got here right down to Vine’s impact on Twitter’s bottom line.
Beykpour also shared an interesting anecdote about working on Periscope. She joined the startup right after it was acquired by Twitter and after leaving Secret. She remembers that she needed to officially rejoin Twitter under a fake name to maintain the takeover a secret for a while.
On Twitter, she also mentioned the difficulty of obtaining resources to develop products and features for power users resembling journalists.
“Twitter really had a hard time defining its user,” she said, because it “used a lot of traditional OKRs and metrics.” But the fact was that “only a fraction of people tweet” and “of the fraction of people who tweet, a subset of people are responsible for the content that everyone wants to see” – this was difficult, in response to Beykpour. to measure.
Now at Particle, her experience building Twitter is getting used to create strategy for an AI-powered news app that goals to offer people with information that interests them and what’s happening around them.
“Particle is a reimagining of the way you consume daily news,” Beykpour says on the podcast. The app goals to offer a multi-perspective look at the news while providing access to high-quality journalism. The startup is looking for one other technique to earn money on reports apart from promoting, subscriptions or micropayments. However, the details of how Particle will do this are still under discussion. The startup is currently in talks with potential publishers on how one can reward them for their work.