Odeo’s Audioblogger
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Audioblogger was a service from Odeo — Evan Williams' podcasting company founded in 2005 — that let users post over-the-phone recordings onto a Blogger site, a mobile-to-web bridge for audio blogging. In October 2006, Odeo announced that as of November 1, 2006, Audioblogger would no longer accept phone calls, ending the ability to post new audio; existing MP3s would continue to be hosted and served.
02 / Odeo’s Audioblogger FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Odeo said the service was too expensive to run, and the company wanted to concentrate on its core podcast product instead. Audioblogger saw little uptake, and mobile quietly slipped off Odeo's radar as the company focused elsewhere — Twitter, built in a February 2006 hackathon, was launched that summer.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Odeo founded
Evan Williams founded Odeo as a podcasting company; Audioblogger served as its phone-to-blog audio service.
- Audioblogger closed
In October 2006, Odeo announced Audioblogger would stop accepting phone calls as of November 1, 2006; existing recordings stayed hosted.
- Twitter born
During a February 2006 hackathon at Odeo, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, and Florian Weber pitched the idea that became Twitter, launched in July 2006.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Odeo launched Audioblogger as a phone-to-Blogger audio posting service.
- 02
Running the service proved too expensive and it saw limited uptake.
- 03
In October 2006, Odeo announced that as of November 1, 2006, Audioblogger would no longer accept phone calls; existing MP3s continued to be hosted.
- 04
Odeo redirected its focus to podcasting and then to Twitter, its breakout hackathon project.