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Sorry, I may have misspoken. I thought Henshaw-Plath was one of TXTMob's
designers prior to the conventions, as Next Generation Labor says, but
Tad Hirsch, who definitely was, gives a somewhat different account here:

"After the RNC, the Ruckus Society convened a weekend-long meeting of
hackers and activists in Oakland to share ideas about how text messaging
could be further developed for activist use. Nathan and I were both there.
Also in attendance were Evan Henshaw-Plath and Blaine Cook, two developers
at Odeo – the podcasting company where Dorsey also worked, which would
eventually turn into Twitter. Plath and Cook were invited for good reason.
Both were major figures in the activist tech world, known for their work on
Indymedia, Protest.net, and other activist media projects. At that meeting,
Evan, Nathan, Blaine and others reviewed the TXTmob source code… and were
frankly shocked at how poorly written it was (it was literally my first
software project). They helpfully suggested a number of improvements that I
implemented later that year. For the next few years TXTmob continued to be
used by several thousand people — largely for non-activist purposes — while
I continued to make fairly minor tweaks to the code. I stayed in touch with
Nathan, Evan, and Blaine, and briefly worked with Evan on TXTmob to support
the Mayday 2006 Immigrant Rights protests in San Francisco.

"It was around this time that Odeo famously transformed itself from a
podcasting company into what would eventually become Twitter ..."

http://publicpractice.org/wp/?p=779

For the drama averse, don't worry: this isn't one of those tech start-up
stories where everyone accuses each other of stealing all the good ideas.
("TXTmob was an open-source project that I freely shared," Hirsch writes.)

On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 7:31 PM, Joseph Catron <[email protected]> wrote:

That's very interesting. It reminds, me in a roundabout way, of protests
> against the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, which were
> coordinated using TXTMob, a group SMS service some radical programmers had
> designed for the occasion (and the anti-DNC protests in Boston). One of
> them, Evan Henshaw-Plath, was part of the team that took the same concept
> commercial with Twitter a couple years later.
>

-- 
"Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen
lytlað."
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