On this day in 2006, Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of the microblogging and social networking service sent the first public tweet that read “just setting up my twttr”. The platform was first created as a prototype in 2006 by Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams – all then employees at podcasting firm Odeo, who were said to have been looking for a new direction for the company. The company officially launched as Twttr in July that year before changing to Twitter shortly after. In 2007, having started to quickly gain users, Twitter was spun off as its own start-up, Dorsey was named chief executive, and the company secured a first round of major investment funding. 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. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as “the SMS of the Internet”.
-ENCL