How It’s Made: Nick Bilton pulls back the curtain on how Twitter entered the lives of everyone.

To the right of this blog post is a Twitter feed, one of 645,750,000.

Twitter has not only become a popular social media network, it has infiltrated human history. It has ignited revolutions, fanned high profile feuds, and even come to a point where hugely influential figures such as the Pope and President Obama convey information to their roughly 45 million combined followers.

But where did this all begin? How did such a simple microblogging tool emerge as one of the most important services of the past century?

Author Nick Bilton delivers a fascinating answer to these questions with his work, “Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal.”

The work proves to be a real page-turner, examining the inception of the company behind the iconic blue bird.

While the inside look at investments, initial technology, board room meetings and more provides a very intimate look behind the curtain; the real draw of the text is the biographies of Twitter’s four co-founders.

The happenings of Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, and Biz Stone play out like a Greek tragedy as they like and dislike ideas, follow and unfollow each other, all while creating a way for everyone to tweet and retweet.

As money quickly changes hands and loyalties are formed, a power struggle of sorts emerges to control the free website. While Twitter begins to take shape as it known today, chaos is seen behind the scenes amongst the four men.

Even the very nature of Twitter was tough to hammer out, as seen in Bilton’s work:

“And then there was the biggest problem of them all: trying to explain to people what Twitter actually was. Everyone had a different answer. ‘It’s a social network.’ ‘It replaces text messages.’ ‘It’s the new email.’ ‘It’s microblogging.’ ‘It’s to update your status.’”

“The confusion led to one of the first topics that Jack and Ev saw differently. Jack saw Twitter as a place to say “what I’m doing.” Ev saw it more like a mini blogging product.”

This disagreement proves to be one of many that unfolds in this excellent retelling of the creation of a historic and iconic venture.

– In the four minutes that it took to read this blog post, about 2,184,000 tweets were sent out from around the world. –