Odeo

» see odeo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i missed odeo. in early '05 i was 21, in turkey, doing university work over ttnet and msn. podcasts were not a thing i was downloading or making, the rss audio category had not landed in turkish-language internet at all. odeo's whole pitch was directory plus browser-based recorder for english-language rss audio, the kind of product whose audience lived between san francisco and brooklyn. i learned the odeo name later, as the company-twitter-came-out-of footnote in every retrospective about evan williams.

noah glass had been running audioblog when he started talking with evan williams in early '05 about a bigger podcast tool. back then. williams had sold pyra labs to google in '03 and was sitting on blogger-money and looking for the next thing. the two of them set up odeo in san francisco in february '05. charles river ventures led a series a in may. the public launch came at the same press week as the o'reilly etech conference. the demo was a directory that indexed rss audio feeds plus a flash recorder that let anyone make a podcast inside the browser and host it on odeo's servers. kevin systrom interned at odeo that summer before going back to stanford and eventually building instagram.

the wind left the room in june '05 when apple shipped itunes 4.9 with native podcast support. the directory was now apple's. the recorder still mattered as a niche tool but the whole product strategy lost its center. inside the same offices a small team around jack dorsey had been hacking on a side project they called twttr, an sms-based status broadcaster. by '06 odeo's morale was on twttr and not on odeo proper. williams bought the company back from its investors in october 2006, refunded their money, and spun out the new entity obvious corporation. twitter went on to be twitter. odeo was the leftover.

obvious sold odeo to sonic mountain in february '07 for an undisclosed price. sonic mountain ran it as a podcast-host product for three more years with declining traffic. the consumer site was suspended in august 2010. the domain hung on registered to sonic mountain until it expired in 2017. by the time the obituaries were being written the founding team had already gone on to build the most-watched social-broadcast platform of the decade, so the press never quite called odeo dead, it called odeo the place twitter came from.

~ the dossier ~

~ the day itunes shipped podcasts ~

this part you had to be inside the room for. odeo's launch press in may '05 was the high point and the wake at the same time. the company had just raised its series a, the consumer demo was working, the founder profile pieces were running. one month later apple announced podcasts inside itunes 4.9. the directory layer of odeo became redundant overnight. williams later said in interviews that the company should have shut down or pivoted that week. it took another sixteen months and a side project to get there.

~ the twitter inheritance ~

jack dorsey had pitched the sms-status idea inside odeo's hack day in march 2006. noah glass named it twttr and registered the domain. for several months it ran as a side toy inside the odeo office, the team was unsure if it was a product at all. the october '06 buy-back was the move that let williams keep the side project and discard the failed parent. glass was pushed out of the deal and out of twitter's founding story in the months that followed. that part of the inheritance is its own published lawsuit and its own set of business-press chapters.

~ the long tail ~

sonic mountain's three-year tenure with odeo barely registers in the public record. the site kept indexing rss audio and the recorder kept working, the team was small and the marketing was none. by '09 the podcast directory category was effectively apple itunes with stitcher in second place. odeo had no role in that lineup. the august 2010 quiet suspension was correctly the last act, the 2017 domain expiry was the formal one. the press never noticed either event. the obituary, when it gets written, is always the same line. twitter was built inside this company before this company died.

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