If you were born before the internet, your definition of twitter might just be “short, high-pitched sounds or strings of sounds associated with birds”. However, that’s not what Twitter means in today’s digital communications world. Twitter is a social media tool that allows people to write a text message, called tweet, which was previously limited to 140 characters, and now provides up to 280 characters. But who founded Twitter?
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Why was Twitter founded?
Twitter emerged as a result of both perceived need and timing. Smartphones were relatively new when Twitter was first conceived by inventor Jack Dorsey, who wanted to use his cell phone to send a message to a service and distribute his message to all his friends. At the time, most of Dorsey’s friends did not have text-enabled cell phones. And spent a lot of time on their home computers. Twitter needed to enable text messaging to have cross-messaging capability, to work on phones, computers, and other devices.
Background – Before Twitter, It Was Twttr
After working solo on the concept for several years, Jack Dorsey brought the idea to a company called Odeo, which hired him as a web designer. Odeo was started as a podcasting company by Noah Glass and others, but Apple Computers had launched a podcasting platform called iTunes to dominate the market, which made Podcasting a bad choice as a venture for Odeo.
Jack Dorsey brought his new ideas to Noah Glass and convinced Glass’s abilities. In February 2006, Glass and Dorsey (with developer Florian Weber) presented the project to the company. Originally named Twttr (named by Noah Glass), the project was “a system where you could send a text to a number and broadcast it to all the people you want.”
The Twttr project was greenlit by Odeo and a working prototype was available by March 2006; By July 2006, the Twttr service was available to the public.
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First Tweet on Twitter When Founded
The first tweet occurred on March 21, 2006, at 9:50 pm Pacific Standard Time, when Jack Dorsey was “just setting up my tweet”.
On July 15, 2006, TechCrunch reviewed the new Twttr service.
Split From Twitter Odeo
Evan Williams and Biz Stone were active investors in Odeo. Evan Williams had created Blogger (called Blogspot), which he sold to Google in 2003. Williams worked briefly at Google before investing in Google employee Biz Stone and leaving to work for Odeo. By September 2006, Evan Williams was CEO of Odeo in a strategic line of business that expressed pessimism about the company’s future. And curtailed Twitter’s potential when Odeo’s investors offered to buy back shares in the company. Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and a few others have garnered controlling attention on Odeo and Twitter. Power enough for Evan Williams to temporarily rename his company “Obvious Corporation” and fire the founder and team leader of the developer twitter program Noah Glass.
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Discussing Evan Williams’ actions, questions about the honesty of his letter to investors, and how Twitter’s history went if he didn’t or didn’t understand Twitter’s potential. However, went in Evan Williams’ favour. And investors were freely willing to sell their investments back to Williams. Twitter (the company) was founded by three main people: Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone. So, Twitter left Odeo in April 2007.
Twitter Gains Popularity
Twitter’s big break came in 2007 South by the Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) music conference. It is when Twitter usage jumped from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. The company heavily promoted the program by relaying Twitter messages, advertising on two giant plasma screens in conference rooms. Conference attendees began tweeting their messages. And today there are more than 150 million tweets with huge spikes occurring during special events every day.
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