History of Twitter: a social network to follow

Below I will give you an outline of the creation of Twitter.

The birth of Twitter

2006 is the beginning of the adventure and the creation of a start-up in the South of Market district of San Francisco, California, renowned for its affordable real estate and tax advantages. A young entrepreneur with a lot of ideas had a special place there.

Jack Dorsey is the name of the main creator of the blue bird. But by the way? Do you know where the name Twitter comes from?

The idea came to him as a child when he heard the calls to the emergency centre in his home town of St. Louis, Missouri:

"The response teams always say where they are, where they're going, what they're doing. That's where the idea for Twitter came from. As soon as we all had a mobile phone and SMS, all of a sudden we could say where we were, where we were going, what we were doing, how we felt. And the phenomenon became global" - statement by the co-founder of Twitter on CBS (source "Enjeux - Les Echos" June 2013).

The history of Twitter: a history of entrepreneurs and experienced developers

Jack Dorsey was apparently always dissatisfied with what he was setting up or doing, from what I have read. As long as it wasn't perfect, he never gave up.

He's going to be hired as a developer to work on a podcast project called "ODEO" alongside Evan Williams (entrepreneur and creator of Bloggers: designer of the blogging platform he sold to Google! Yes!) and Noah Glass (a famous developer in Silicon Valley) ...

This project wants to compete with a platform that you all know and that is well established at the time: "ITunes"; difficult therefore ... and while Williams is struggling to develop this idea. Noah Glass and Jack Dorsey are looking for ... something else!

The Twitter project becomes reality

It's time to develop, to find the idea that will change everything and propel Dorsey and Glass on another playground: it will be a system that will use SMS to let people know in real time what they are doing (sound familiar?); its first name will be Twttr inspired by Flickr (photo sharing service), then, later, it will turn into Twitter

March 21, 2006, 10:50 a.m.: Jack Dorsey publishes the first tweet in the history of Twitter: "Just setting up my Twttr". ("Just setting up my Twitter")! Still private for a few days, Twitter is open to the public on 31 March 2006.

The tweet will be the one you still know today, 140 characters long, which chatterboxes find too short and which people in a hurry love!

Did you know that a 140-character tweet is the 160 characters of an SMS, minus 20 characters to allow for a signature or the famous @ to address someone? The hashtag # will also make its appearance to facilitate the search of those who want to find all the tweets talking about the same theme.

This exchange platform is still full of bugs at this stage but is nevertheless presented in Austin (Texas) during a festival mixing new technologies, cinema and music and will win a prize in the category ... BLOGS!

The ODEO project is abandoned and for lack of sufficient means, some of the "instigators" who made the history of Twitter are dismissed. We will have to find money to keep this project alive and therefore investors who will believe in it.

Money is the sinews of war for the success of a project

A project of this scale, even an award-winning one, is not viable if funds are not found to develop it.

Summer 2007: convinced investors such as big names from Silicon Valley and the co-founder of Netscape put 5 million dollars on the table and Twitter was able to gradually take its place among the big boys and in March 2008, it reached the million user mark!

Nowadays, Twitter, which until then had been spared, is gradually introducing targeted advertising on its network; another way of making money!

Report this Page