Evan Williams is currently one of the world’s most popular web celebrities, all thanks to Twitter’s exponential growth in the last 12 months. He, with his Odeo team, co-founded the micro-blogging service on March 21 2006, which had emerged from a simple SMS service to a platform used by millions of people around the world – be it celebrities, bloggers, businesses or even ordinary people like you and me.
Recently, the folks at T3 released its second annual list of the technology world’s most powerful men and women. And Evan Williams was ranked second in ‘T3 Tech 100‘. T3 called Twitter “the darling of the tech industry” because the site goes down frequently during tech events (Apple September Event and WWDC) due to the astounding number of tweets posted by users simultaneously. In my own opinion, Evan deserves to be one of the most influential people in technology as he had contributed greatly to the success of the San Francisco-based service. Besides having co-founded Twitter, he had spun off several notable companies or websites such as Pyra Labs, Blogger (a note-taking feature at that time) and Odeo (a podcasting company).
However, what surprises me is that neither his partners – Biz Stone nor Jack Dorsey – were featured in the list. Both Biz and Jack played an important role in helping Twitter achieve tremendous success too. Biz is the Creative Director of Twitter and helped to create and launch Xanga and Blogger. On the other hand, Jack first introduced the idea of a service that used SMS to tell small groups what an individual was doing, partly inspired by TXTMob to the other employees at Odeo. Unfortunately, these amazing tech entrepreneurs weren’t included in ‘T3 Tech 100’.
First in the list goes to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. No doubt and this isn’t something surprising. They were the driving force behind the search engine giant and has helped to expand the company to other useful services/products such as its Android mobile operating system, the Chrome web browser and GMail.
Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify, a Swedish-based proprietary peer-to-peer music streaming service that allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums with almost no buffering delay, appears in third slot of the list. His innovation and leadership has indeed changed the face of the music industry.
Other familiar faces on the list include Stephen Fry (4th), Steve Jobs (7th), Eric Schmidt (8th), Mark Zukerberg (9th) and Steve Ballmer (10th). Barack Obama, dubbed as “the most important person in the world” and Kevin Rose, founder of Digg were ranked 18th and 57th on the list respectively.
According to T3, eight judges, each representing different areas of the tech industry did the voting. “We looked at the company each person represented, their profits and how many times they’d appeared in the news this year. Each person’s Twitter account was analysed and Google search results counted; whether they managed to create a whole new market for their product, or wrote such cutting prose that a manufacturer’s wares ceased to sell.”