March 21, 2006: Twitter Takes Flight

Monday, 21 March 2011 12:00

March 21, 2006: Twitter Takes Flight

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March 21, 2006: Twitter Takes Flight

2006: Jack Dorsey sends the world’s first (non-automated) tweet:

inviting co-workers

The expression is as uninspiring as Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you,” which was uttered 130 years and a few days earlier. But it also heralds a new means of communication whose impact might rival even that of the telephone.

Five years on, Twitter is still derided by some as over-hyped, a vast wasteland of “I am eating a ham sandwich” irrelevancies and non sequiturs, almost as big a waste of time as Facebook.

But it has also been credited with accelerating revolutions, spawning new forms of literature, acting as a real-time water cooler for the sharing of MST3k-type snark during shared experiences like the Oscars, and generally acting as humanity’s de facto discovery and early warning system for … everything.

Not bad for a service that might have been called the “Twttr” that Dorsey had thought up five years earlier but never quite “solidified” until March 2006. Dorsey, who would make the act of reflexively recording one’s status de rigeur, kept marvelous historical records of his little project — as evidenced in the picture above, circa 2001, shared on Flickr four days after the first tweet. Dorsey wrote in the caption:

From an excited discussion and persuasion on the South Park playground to a recently approved application for a SMS shortcode. I’m happy this idea has taken root; I hope it thrives.
Some things are worth the wait.

Dorsey pitched a now-defunct Silicon Valley company called Odeo in 2006 about his idea for a status-sharing service, based on SMS. That approach got him two key partners — Odeo executives Biz Stone and Evan Williams. The three started a company named Obvious, which would become Twitter. Dorsey stepped down as CEO in 2008 (but remains chairman) and then founded Square.

As the story goes, Dorsey elaborated on his idea during a casual Mexican lunch at that San Francisco hotbed of startup DNA, South Park.

Coding began March 13, and eight days later a machine-generated tweet was issued from Dorsey’s account (No. 12):

just setting up my twttr

While this is widely considered the world’s first tweet, Dorsey is adamant that “inviting co-workers” (his Odeo colleagues) was the first, and so is Twitter.

Dorsey — ever the archivist — treated the Twitterverse last week to a spontaneous history of the early days of the company, sharing IM logs, pictures and anecdotes in a series of tweets over several days. He used the hashtag #twittr, which was what the service was called when it launched publicly in July 2006. Check out the entire stream, in chronological order, on this Storify page.

However you spell it, Dorsey credits “@Noah Glass & the Oxford English: ‘a short inconsequential burst of information, chirps from birds’” for the name of the company that is now entirely part of the lexicon.

“Twttr” was partly an homage to Flickr and is an expression of the SMS short code 89887 (“T”=”8 “W”=”9?, “R”=”7? on a phone’s numerical pad). Sadly, Teen People owned that string. Eventually, the founders settled on “40404” for “ease of use and memorability”

Like the telephone, Twitter was not an obvious sell. Even TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington — no slouch when it comes to vetting startups — had his doubts:

If this was a new startup, a one- or two-person shop, I’d give it a thumbs-up for innovation and good execution on a simple but viral idea.
But the fact that this is coming from Odeo makes me wonder –- what is this company doing to make their core offering compelling? How do their shareholders feel about side projects like Twttr, when their primary product line is, besides the excellent design, a total snoozer?

Indeed, Twitter did not break out until the following year, at SXSW 2007. And the rest, as they say, is history. Or maybe twitstory.

Twitter now has funding of $360 million, is thought by some to be worth perhaps $10 billion, and is backed by some of sharpest investors in Silicon Valley. The hottest private startup next to Facebook says it has no immediate plans to raise more money or go public.

“We are not even discussing it internally,” Stone said earlier this month. “It’s too far off.”

Source: Various

Top photo: Jack Dorsey/Flickr.
Second image: Jack Dorsey/Tumblr

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