Origin of ordinary things: Twitter
Tuesday, August 17, 2021

Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. 

By 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day.

Twitter’s origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session” held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, then an undergraduate student at New York University, 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 podcasting company, Odeo embraced the idea and developed the premier version of my.stat.us which was eventually code-named twttr.

The platform was eventually renamed Twitter and it would limit communications between its users to 140 characters with each message.

Messages then evolved to tweets and everyone with a phone or laptop represented a new potential connection.

After it was founded in 2006, it won the best start up making its first crack into mainstream recognition in March 2007.

After three months, it held its first round of funding, raising $5 million and receiving a valuation of $20 million.

After 4 years, Twitter was hosted by the White House with President Barack Obama and in the same year and in the next month, it reached 200 million monthly active users.

As of today, over 500 million tweets are posted a day, and one in five adult people is an active user of twitter around the world.