Five things you may not know about Twitter co-founder Biz Stone

Twitter celebrated its fifth birthday over the weekend, but what about its 37-year-old co-founder Biz Stone? Here’s a quick look at the highly successful young man.

By William Nestor

In truth, up until recently I was a Twitter virgin but since getting hooked I can see what I’ve been missing out on.

Over the weekend Twitter celebrated its fifth birthday and with the site not far off 200 million worldwide users, there seems to be no let up in its success.

At the grassroots of Twitter is Isaac “Biz” Stone. At 37 years young, the co-founder and Creative Director of the infectious micro-blogging site has it made for life.

Here at JOE we've taken a quick look at some interesting facts about the Bostonian that you may not have come across. One of which is complete nonsense.

Biz thought about calling the micro-blogging site Jitter instead of Twitter

We had a lot of words like ‘Jitter’ and things that reflected a hyper-nervousness,” Biz said in a New York Times interview. “Somebody threw ‘Twitter’ in the hat. I thought “Oh, that’s the short trivial bursts of information that birds do.”

Biz has a clone

Okay, maybe not. But last year he was featured in a Stoli Vodka ad where he is seen having a conversation with himself. It's a terrible production. Have a look for yourself:

Biz never answers a question with more than 140 characters*

When giving interviews Biz will have concentration etched across his face as he attempts to answer questions with no more than 140 characters in his responses.

Biz turned down a $500 million offer buyout from Facebook

In November 2008 Mark Zuckerberg’s social media network, Facebook, tried to buy Twitter for a cool $500 million but Stone and the powers that be at Twitter declined.

“We admire and respect Facebook,” Stone said at the time. “We are big fans, actually. They approached us, and we took it seriously. But we feel like we want to continue this path we're on – sustaining this innovation – and the time is not right.”

Biz only follows just over 500 people on Twitter

You would think he would follow a hell of a lot more, given that he was one of the first twitterers five years ago. Biz follows celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Eva Longoria and Tom Hanks. The nerd-done-well does have in excess of 1.6 million followers though – only a few more than me.