Book Review: 'Hatching Twitter' by Nick Bilton

If Twitter programmer Noah Glass's marriage wasn't unraveling, he might not have designed a product to make people feel less alone.

Oct. 31, 2013 7:10 p.m. ET

In early 2006, employees at a fledgling San Francisco startup named Odeo knew they were in trouble. Not only had their podcasting platform failed to gain traction, but Apple had just announced that it was adding podcasts to iTunes, effectively eliminating whatever need there might have been for Odeo's nascent product.

Determined to innovate their way out of this box, the team of irreverent hackers struggled for a new direction, a "pivot," in Silicon Valley parlance, as funding dwindled and tensions grew. Yet from...

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