Twitter founders plan to relaunch Obvious

TWITTER'S FOUNDERS plan to relaunch the company that led to the ultimate success of Twitter.

Biz Stone and Evan Williams will set up The Obvious Corporation, which will help develop and incubate new projects designed to help people work together to improve the world.

The corporation is a recreation of a company set up by Williams, who used it to buy back a failed project from investors after everyone they went to refused to buy it. Part of that failed project turned out to be Twitter, which was initially slated as being "useless". Its denigrators turned out to be very wrong.

The duo were distracted from Obvious by the unprecedented success of Twitter, eventually letting Obvious fade from existence. Now they plan to tone down their involvement with the Twitter team and refocus on their original company. Stone labeled the move as "a dream come true."

They will remain with Twitter in an advisory role, supporting CEO Dick Costolo, who took over from Williams last October. In addition to The Obvious Corporation, Stone plans to devote some attention to The Biz, the Livia Stone Foundation and a number of non-profit organisations.

Both Stone and Williams previously worked at Google on its blogging service Blogger. Before that Stone had tried to set up a microblogging service called Sideblogger, but that did not work out. Eventually the duo, along with the help of others, created and launched Twitter, and it was largely down to the support and funding of Obvious that it was able to get off the ground.

Twitter has earned a prominant place in the social networking market that allows it to exist and grow without directly competing with Facebook, unlike the newly launched Google+.

One area Twitter has failed to capitalise on is advertising, but that is slowly changing and will likely be a major focus under Costolo's leadership. While Twitter prepares to pull in the big dollars, its founders are hoping to develop other projects that might be equally as successful. µ