Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams - Agenda Setters 2008

Name: Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams

Title: Twitter co-founders

Position: 22    Last year: Not ranked

Why? Making the mundane surprisingly interesting

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Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams are the holy trinity who co-founded Twitter, a service that popularised the business of broadcasting up-to-the-minute personal status messages to whoever wants to listen (a practice known as microblogging).

Twitter began life as a side project for staff at a San Francisco start-up before being opened up to the wider world, in autumn 2006. It's now a separate company in its own right - Twitter Inc - with Dorsey as CEO.

Earlier this year, microblogging made it onto analyst Gartner's annual tech hype cycle for the first time. And while the number of Twitter users is a matter for speculation, there's no doubt it's because of these three that Twitter has become the 'household name' of microblogging - and the standard by which other offerings are judged.

One Agenda Setters judge summed Twitter up thus: "The antidote to the boredoms of focused attention, the technological enablement of the human need 'to distract and be distracted' endlessly and in real-time", while another called it "a viral idea that adds value, surprised and delighted us".