In Twitter History, you will find that it has served well to provide critical information such as eyewitness accounts on troubling events like the Mumbai attacks in 2008. The micro-blogging service has become one of the quickest ways to receive news and other information.
Details of the creation of twitter are as indicated – Jack Dorsey had grown interested in knowing what his friends were doing. Jack wondered if there existed an opportunity to build something around this ‘status’ concept. At a time when Odeo Corp’s future was looking bleak, Odeo Corp (now known as Obvious Corp) members held a day-long brainstorming session. Jack described an idea that using SMS (Short Messaging Service) one can communicate to small groups, a concept partly inspired by the SMS group messaging service.
Jack claims that project actually took on the name ‘Status’ for quite a while. The hunt for a suitable name was on. Mobile played a major aspect, as Jack liked the SMS aspect, and using which updates could be sent to and received from anywhere. He wished to have that feeling captured – the physical sensation that one is being buzzed by a friend and came up with the word “twitch”, because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. The word twitch was not a good product name and they searched for words around it in dictionary and thus came up with the word “Twitter”. Twitter was defined as ‘a series of chirps’.
The original name of the product or the code name was ‘twttr’, inspired by the fact that American short codes are five characters. Work on the project start on March 21 2006 when Jack Dorsey published the first twitter message – “just setting up my twttr”.
Twitter was publicly launched in July 2006. Jack Dorsey along with Evan Williams, Biz Stone and other Odeo Corp members, formed Obvious Corporation in October of 2006 and got themselves all the assets Odeo including Odeo itself.com and Twitter.com from the share holders and investors.
The twitter web interface uses a web application framework called ‘Ruby on Rails’. Using Omnigraffle and Photoshop, the Twitter website and user interface were made to look as it is now. Ruby on Rails was used to provide skeleton frameworks which would allow quick and easy ways to work, there by avoiding re-inventing the wheel every time a new feature is added.
Twitter’s popularity soared in the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival held in Austin, Texas. At the event tweets rose from 20,000 to 60,000. Soon, everyone around the world were buzzing and posting about this new thing called Twitter which was sort of instant messaging and blogging. With the users having the opportunity to call the shots and decide from whom to receive the tweets and when to receive them apart from the fact that no installation is necessary to start tweeting, it has caught on like a fire, spreading far and wide. Twitter provides a way to stay connected to friends, relatives and others and stay updated of what’s happening around the world.
