Review of "Things A Little Bird Told Me"

I find it interesting that many of the books I read about entrepreneurs and successful people have exhibited interesting, take charge habits from early in life. The author, Biz Stone, exhibits this behavior throughout the book, but there is a specific example that stood out to me. Biz writes about forming his own lacrosse team at his high school, and in my opinion, that would take some serious courage and work to get a sports team off of the ground from nowhere. This leads me to believe that in many instances people are born with the abilities and drive to create and do great things. I believe it is possible to learn the skills necessary but it is very difficult to do. Even when someone learns how to lead and build a business my guess is that it takes an even more unique person who was born with the ability to change themselves into something else that they want to be. Most successful people have some unique attributes that allow them to succeed that others who don’t run their own businesses do not possess.

One of my favorite parts of “Things a Little Bird Told Me” was the guerilla marketing strategy Biz executed at the SXSW conference in 2007. By putting up monitors in all the hallways and letting people see their tweets come up on the monitors in real time Biz was able to see the “flocking” effect that twitter was capable of. This is when he knew he had a hit product on his hands. I can relate to how much usage Twitter receives at conferences and its effect on the attending crowd. When I have attended Codemash in the past I have witnessed the “flocking” effects that can happen from a popular attendee tweeting what he is going to be doing and seeing the number of people who follow that person. I have even found my way to a social gathering or two by way of a tweet.

Overall the book was a quick read that kept me interested through the first 80% of it. The end of the book seemed to run quickly through an important series of events and it was not engaging. I would guess Biz got busy on another venture and didn’t put forth the time and effort to finish the book properly. I would recommend this book to anybody interested in one of the founders perspective’s of how Twitter got started. There are other books out there that describe the same events but Biz was the only one who remained friendly and neutral with all other parties that were a part of launching Twitter.