Google pioneered the development of the first social networking application for Android

Sara Beykpour, former senior product manager at Twitter and now co-founder of AI news startup Particle, shared her story in a podcast.

Joining Twitter in 2009 as a tools engineer when the company had just 75 employees, Beykpour then moved to mobile, where she witnessed the explosion of third-party Twitter apps across platforms. like BlackBerry and iOS. Twitter even acquired Loren Brichter’s Tweetie as the basis for its first official iOS app.

Although the Twitter app for Android is branded Twitter, it has a significant contribution from Google. According to Beykpour, Google created a demo application and provided it to Twitter.

This is not the first time Google has supported popular social networking applications. Previously, they also participated in developing the Foursquare application.

Mignano’s recent podcast mentioned that Google apps in their early stages have a pretty similar interface. This makes many people surprised and question the reason behind this similarity.

According to Beykpour, one of the main reasons is that Google wants to encourage companies to use the Android operating system. Creating applications with a unified interface helps developers easily visualize and build their applications on the Android platform, thereby promoting the development of the application ecosystem on Android.

Continuing the development momentum, Twitter has chosen the Android application platform built by Google to continue developing its application. During this period, Beykpour joined Twitter as the company’s second Android engineer.

What few people know is that Google developed the Twitter application for Android in 2010. This information was revealed in an old Google blog post , but has since been forgotten and forgotten.

Beykpour also shared many interesting memories about the early days of Twitter. One of them is that she used to be in charge of the short video app Vine (after returning to Twitter from Secret ). At that time, Beykpour faced great pressure to launch Vine on the Android platform before Instagram launched its own video feature. Thanks to his tireless efforts, Beykpour successfully accomplished this goal when he launched Vine just two weeks before Instagram Video launched.

Beykpour shared that the launch of Instagram Video had a strong impact on Vine’s user base, contributing to the app’s decline. Although Vine officially closed a few years later, Beykpour still affirmed that Twitter’s decision was completely correct because Vine had stopped growing and was expensive to maintain.

Beykpour recounts an interesting story about his time working at Periscope . After Twitter acquired this startup, she joined the Periscope team. However, to keep the acquisition a secret, Beykpour was forced to rejoin Twitter under a fake name.

Beykpour shared more about the challenge of devoting resources to developing products and features for professional users, such as journalists. The reason is because Twitter has difficulty identifying and classifying users based on traditional metrics and goals. In reality, only a small percentage of users use Twitter regularly, and of those, only a small minority create content that attracts a large audience. According to Beykpour, this is a difficult problem in measuring and evaluating effectiveness.

Beykpour is applying his experience to build Particle, an AI news app with the goal of bringing users the most important and up-to-date information. Particle differentiates itself from other news apps by providing multiple perspectives on an event and allowing users to access high-quality news sources. The startup is looking for new business models beyond advertising, subscriptions or micropayments to make money from news coverage. Currently, Particle is discussing with potential publishing partners how to compensate them.