Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Nick Bilton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was more about the drama surrounding the relationships of Twitter’s four founders than about Twitter itself. It was interesting to read how Twitter “hatched”, and the drama — while shared at the expense of real people (feels like insiders’ gossip) — was entertaining. It’s obvious that the author is not a fan of Jack Dorsey. Because he does not list specific citations and sources, it’s hard to know how accurate the recollections are, or from whose memory each detail comes from. I can see “Hatching Twitter” turned into a movie, similar to “The Social Network”.
I was ready to give this four stars, but I had to dock a star for the following reasons:
1. Numerous spelling and grammatical errors.
2. The chapter about Snoop Dogg and his entourage visiting the Twitter offices was meant to be funny, and it was. But I didn’t like how Bilton suddenly has to point out that Snoop’s entourage was mostly black men, and how the engineer who was teaching them about Twitter was white. I didn’t like this particular sentence: “As a result, most execs were missing from the office as the slight, white engineer tried to entertain Snoop Dogg and his posse….he was like a substitute teacher trying to manage a group of unruly kids.” What, the black folks are unruly kids? You may argue that I’m reading more into it than intended, but the fact that Bilton specifies race in this chapter rubs me the wrong way. It wouldn’t have bothered me if he hadn’t mentioned race. Oh well.
