Twitter is a website based in San Francisco, CA that is owned and operated by Twitter Inc. It offers a micro-blogging and social networking service that enables its users to read and send messages that are referred to as “tweets.” Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the users’ profile. Tweets are publicly visible by default. However, senders are able to restrict message delivery to just their followers. Users can subscribe to other users’ tweets. This is known as following and subscribers are known as followers. Twitter also has servers and offices in Texas, Massachusetts, Boston and San Antonio.
Twitter has gained international popularity since its creation and launch in 2006 by Jack Dorsey. Currently there are more than 175 million users and it is estimated that 65 million tweets a day are generated and over 800,000 search queries per day are handled. Some people refer to Twitter as the “SMS of the Internet.”
Twitter was developed during a brainstorming session that was held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service in order to communicate with a small group. Originally, the project code name for the service was “twttr” which was inspired by Flickr and the 5 character length of American SMS short codes. The developers initially considered “10958” as a short code and then later changed it to “40404” to be easy to memorize. On March 21, 2006, Dorsey published the first Twitter message “just setting up my twttr.” They eventually came across the word “twitter,” it was perfect as the definition was “chirps from birds,” and “a short burst of inconsequential information,” exactly what the product was.
The initial Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees. On July 15, 2006, the full version was publicly introduced. In October of that same year, Evan Williams, Dorsey, Biz Stone and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all of its assets, including Odeo.com and Twitter.com from the investors and the shareholders. By April 2007, Twitter had spun off to its own company.
