March 21 in History
2006 - Jack Dorsey sends the world's first Twitter message, or tweet
‘just setting up my twttr’ – Jack Dorsey created history of sorts with his five-word message sent out at 9:50 p.m. on this day in 2006, starting what is known as the Twitter project, which today has evolved into one of the most popular microblogging sites, sending out over 500 million tweets per day.
Created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, the online news and networking service was officially launched in July of that year. Dorsey came up with the idea that he later developed as Twitter while studying at NYU, during a “daylong brainstorming session” held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. 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 decision was also partly due to the fact that the domain twitter.com was already in use, and it was six months after the launch of twttr that the crew purchased the domain and changed the name of the service to Twitter. The developers initially considered ‘10958’ as a short code, but later changed it to ‘40404’ for “ease of use and memorability”. Dorsey explained the origin of the ‘Twitter’ title as:
..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.
-nsoj.in