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Biz Stone on Conan: Twitter Was Once the 'Seinfeld of the Internet'

by Amar Toor on March 23, 2011 at 09:20 AM

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone made an appearance on Conan the other night, in honor of his company's 5th birthday. The occasion gave Stone a chance to take a brief look back on the early days of Twitter when, as O'Brien duly pointed out, many people thought the microblogging platform served no real purpose.

"Everybody said 'Twitter's useless,'" Stone recalled. "To which my co-founder Evan Williams said, 'Well, so's ice cream. You want us to ban ice cream and all joy?' We said, 'Screw that. We'll just keep working on it.'" He went on to remind Conan that Twitter was once referred to as the "'Seinfeld' of the Internet" -- i.e., a site about nothing. "I love Seinfeld," Stone said.

Conan then pulled out some of Stone's less interesting tweets -- all of which were about food -- before ending the segment on a more serious note. After leaving NBC last year, O'Brien masterfully used Twitter and other social media to create his own 'Team Coco' brand, which allowed him to build momentum before launching his TBS show. "[Twitter] was huge for me," he said. "A year ago when I found myself without a television show and banned from doing a lot of things, it was the one thing that we were allowed to do... It changed my life."

Tags: BizStone, ConanObrien, LateNightTalkShows, SocialNetworking, top, tv, twitter, Web

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