Social Textiles

 

Internet Archaeology – history and sketches of Twitter (in 503 characters)

Posted on Monday February 2nd 2009 at 11:02

The immenseley popular Social Media tool Twitter was founded in March 2006 by Evan Williams (@ev), Biz Stone (@Biz) and Jack Dorsey (@jack) who all worked at the podcasting company Odeo. The initial idea of Twitter however, started already in 2000 and came from a frustration from Jack Dorsey who was quite active at LiveJournal but wanted to create an even more ‘live’ journal: “Real-time, up-to-date, from the road.” He tried to slip the idea of live status updates into each project he was working on, but it was only at a daylong brainstorm at Odeo that he found the right people to start Twitter.

First Sketch of Twitter by Jack Dorsey

First Sketch of Twitter by Jack Dorsey

The initial use case for Twitter they worked on, was strongly linked to your mobile phone and text messaging and was city related: “Telling people that the club he’s at is happening. I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.” The first name one of the users came up with was friendstalker, but eventually became twttr, a name which was -self evidently- inspired by flickr, but also by the fact that American SMS shortcodes are five characters. Still, from the very first beginning they were using the name twitter (with the vowels) but had to halfly launch at twttr.com as they didn’t own www.twitter.com yet.
Twitter used to call Twttr - Mind the green logo.

Twitter used to call Twttr - Mind the green logo.

As Odeo needed to lay off a few of the founding fathers of Twitter a new home for this instant status update-service was needed. Obvious was born and it had the sole purpose of being the incubator for Twitter (in April 2007 Twitter got its own company -Twitter inc- with Jack Dorsey as a CEO). For a long while Twitter stayed in private beta and had the opportunity to grow in close contact with (and thus with a lot of feedback from) a small number of first user and enthusiasts. Now, Twitter seems to be the new popular kid on the social media block as it has by one measure over 3 million accounts and, by another, well over 5 million visitors in September 2008, a fivefold increase in a month (source: wikipedia).

Trivia:

  • There were no whales, nor birds in the beginning. The initial mascot was an indian (asian?) girl
  • One of the initial team members Dom Sagolla is working on a book called “140 Characters
    A literary guide for terse content”
  • The initial Twitter (or should I say twttr) colour was green
  • The short code to send your message to the Twitter service was “89887″ (which reads TWTTR on the numeric pad of your cell phone). It was later changed to 40404 as this was much easier to remember
  • The initial Twitter question to trigger action was not “What are you doing?” but the more informal “what are you up to?”
Indian (asian?) girl - the first mascot of Twitter

Indian (asian?) girl - the first mascot of Twitter

You’re on Twitter? Cool! I’m on Twitter too…

via: Wikipedia – 140 characters – Flickr

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