Twitter is an online social networking and micro
blogging service that enables its
users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as
"tweets".
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. Twitter
rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 200 million users as of 2011, generating over 200 million tweets and
handling over 1.6 billion search
queries per day. It is sometimes described as "the SMS of
the Internet."
Twitter Inc., the company that operates the service and associated
website, is based in San
Francisco, with additional servers and offices in San Antonio, Boston, and New York City.
Twitter's origins lie in a
"daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Dorsey introduced the idea of an
individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams
later ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of
American SMS short codes. The
developers initially considered "10958" as a short code, but later
changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability." Work on the project started on March
21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): "just setting up my
twttr".
"...we came across the word
'twitter', and it was just perfect. The definition was 'a short burst of
inconsequential information,' and 'chirps from birds'. And that's exactly what
the product was." –Jack Dorsey
The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for
Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other
members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all of its
assets–including Odeo.com and Twitter.com–from the investors and shareholders. Williams fired Glass who was silent
about his part in Twitter's startup until 2011. Twitter spun off into its own company
in April 2007.
