On July 15, 2006, podcasting company Odeo, based in San Francisco, officially published Twttr – later changed to Twitter – its short messaging service (SMS) for groups, to the public.
Born as a side project outside of Odeo’s main podcasting platform, the free app allowed users to share short status updates with groups of friends by texting a single number (“40404”). In the next few years, when Twttr became Twitter, the simple “microblogging” service would explode in popularity, becoming one of the leading social media platforms in the world.
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams first made a name for himself in the Silicon Valley tech world by founding the Web newspaper publishing service Blogger, which he sold to Google in 2003 for several million dollars. In 2005, William co-founded Odeo with another entrepreneur, Noah Glass; this fall, however, Odeo’s main service became obsolete when Apple launched iTunes (including an integrated podcasting platform).
After Williams asked the team of 14 employees to brainstorm their best ideas for the flailing startup, one of the company’s engineers, Jack Dorsey, came up with the concept of a service that allows users to share personal status updates via SMS to groups of people. In March 2006, they had a working prototype and a name – Twttr – inspired in part by bird sounds, and adopted after other choices (including FriendStalker) were rejected. Dorsey (@Jack) posted the very first tweet (“just setting up my twttr”) on March 21.
When Twttr was launched to the public in July 2006, it was still a side project of Odeo, while the company’s main offering, the podcasting platform, was going nowhere. . This fall, according to a report published in Internal of the business community, Williams bought the company’s investors, changed the name of Odeo to Obvious Corporation and fired Glass, whose role in the birth of Twitter (including his name) would only become public years later.
Six months after the launch, Twttr had become Twitter. Once the service was made public, its founders imposed a 140 character limit for messages, depending on the maximum length of text messages at the time; it was then extended to 280 characters.
The use of Twitter exploded at the South by Southwest convention in Austin, Texas in March 2007, when more than 60,000 tweets were sent per day, and grew rapidly from there. By 2013, the New york times said the company had more than 2,000 employees and more than 200 million active users. In November of this year, when the company went public, it was valued at just over $ 31 billion.
Although the Twitter user base is much smaller than that of Facebook (which had more than 2 billion monthly active users in 2019), it has increasingly become a source of news and information. last hour, especially for young users. The importance of the business increased with the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, who was outspoken on Twitter throughout his campaign and often tweeted political decisions or other announcements during his administration. Like other social media companies, Twitter and its CEO Dorsey have faced pressure to tighten up control over site content to prevent bullying, harassment and hate speech, as well as to better protect the privacy of its users in an increased political climate.
