Here’s a little history of the startup that might not be widely known outside of tech companies themselves: The first versions of popular Android apps like Twitter were built by Google itself. This revelation came through a new podcast with Twitter’s former senior director of product management, Sara Beykpour, now co-founder of AI news startup Particle.
In a podcast hosted by Lightspeed partner Michael Mignano, Beykpour reflects on her role in Twitter’s history. He explains how he started working at Twitter in 2009, initially as a tools engineer, when the company only employed about 75 people. Beykpour later moved to work on mobile at Twitter at a time when other third-party apps were becoming mainstream on other platforms, such as BlackBerry and iOS. One of them, Loren Brichter’s Tweetie, was even acquired by Twitter to form the basis of its first official iOS app.
As for Twitter’s Android app, which came from Google, Beykpour said.
The Twitter client for Android was “a demo app that Google had built and given to us,” he said on the podcast. “They did it with all the popular social networking apps at the time: Foursquare… Twitter… they all looked the same in those early days because Google wrote them all.”
Mignano interjected, “Wait, take it back. explain this. So Google wanted companies to adopt Android to build apps for you?”
“Yes, exactly,” Beykpour replied.
Twitter then took the Android app built by Google and continued to develop it. Beykpour was the second Android engineer at the company, he said.
In fact, Google has detailed its work on the Android Twitter client in a 2010 blog postbut much of the press cover in the year he didn’t credit the app to Google’s work, making it a forgotten piece of Internet history. In Google’s post, the company explains how it applied the first Android best practices to the Twitter app. Beykpour told TechCrunch that the post’s author, Virgil Dobjanschi, was the lead software engineer.
“If we had questions, we had to ask him,” he recalls.
Beykpour shared other stories about the early days of Twitter. For example, he worked on Twitter’s video app, Vine, (after returning to Twitter from a stint at Secret) and was pushed to launch Vine on Android before Instagram launched its video product. It met that deadline by launching Vine about two weeks before Instagram Video, he said.
The latter affected Vine’s numbers “significantly” and, in Beykpour’s opinion, is what led to the popular app’s downfall.
“That was the day the writing was on the wall,” he said, even though it took years for Vine to finally shut down.
At Twitter, Beykpour led the shutdown of Vine — an app that’s still so popular that even new Twitter/X owner Elon Musk holds teasing to restore it. But Beykpour believes Twitter made the right decision with Vine, noting that the app didn’t grow and was expensive to run. He admits others may see it differently, perhaps arguing that Vine lacked resources or leadership support. But ultimately, the shutdown is due to Vine’s impact on Twitter’s bottom line.
Beykpour also shared an interesting anecdote about working on Periscope. She joined the startup just as it was acquired by Twitter and after she left Secret. He recalls having to officially rejoin Twitter under a fake name to keep the acquisition under wraps for a while.
On Twitter, he also talked about the difficulty in obtaining resources to develop products and features for power users such as journalists.
“Twitter really struggled to define their user,” he said, because they were “using a lot of traditional OKRs and metrics.” But the fact that “only a fraction of people tweet” and “of the fraction of people who tweet, a subset of them are responsible for the content that everyone really wants to see,” was something that Beykpour says was difficult. to measure.
Now at Particle, her experience building Twitter is the news strategy for the AI news app, which aims to connect people with the news they care about and what’s happening around them.
“The particle is a representation of how you get your daily news,” Beykpour says on the podcast. The app aims to provide a multi-perspective view of the news while providing access to high-quality journalism. The startup is looking to find another way to monetize referrals beyond ads, subscriptions or micropayments. However, the details of how Particle will do this are still up for debate. The startup is currently in discussions with potential publisher partners about how to compensate them for their work.
