A short history of Twitter
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Origins
Developed as internal application in the Odeo offices in early 2006, Twitter was released to the public in October of that year and began gaining widespread popularity. Odeo, now called Obvious, is a San Francisco podcasting startup company founded by Evan Williams and Biz Stone of Blogger fame.
Jack Dorsey, employee of Odeo (now Obvious) and founder of Twitter. From a need to enhance internal communication at Odeo, Dorsey took the idea behind Facebook's status update window to a self- contained and powerful microblogging tool. Photograph by Jack Dorsey |
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Jack Dorsey's original sketch idea for twitter. He was still calling the concept 'stat.us' at this point. Photograph by Jack Dorsey |
Early screenshots
Jack Dorsey persuaded Evan Williams to let him create a prototype of the site, and with help from
colleague Biz Stone they created what you see above. Although basic, it does the job, and allowed
the concept to be tested.
This is what Twitter looked like when it was first launched, with some design elelements added, but still very clunky and still called 'twittr'. The final evolution, in use today, is shown below. Users can insert their own background image, and these are often designed to incorporate some self-promotion.
Profile details are restricted to a website URL and 140 words of text.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is one of many politicians, along with opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull and American President Barack Obama, who use Twitter to herald policy announcements and public appearances, as part of their information strategy.
The big question is many cases is who exactly is doing the tweeting? One could be forgiven for thinking that, in at least some cases, it may a duty delegated to an office staffer.
The name
In Jack Dorsey's own words, he describes how much Twitter was to be as much a medium for the mobile phone as a web application:
We wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you're buzzing your friend's pocket. It's like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word 'twitch', because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But 'twitch' is not a good product name because it doesn't bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and 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.
The fail whale
Twitter experienced its share of growing pains as it scaled up to accommodate huge increases in traffic. Twitter outages were commonplace during a large chunk of mid-2008, spawning the familiar 'fail whale' image as a 'website is down' message Twitter would frequently display when over capacity. Fans of the service went as far as to create a fail whale fan club.
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