Twitter, the free social networking and microblogging site which is among the most popular social networking sites, started as a side project in March of 2006 and has rapidly grown into a real time short messaging service which works across multiple networks and devices.
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. It was Jack's idea to make use of SMS to communicate to small groups of same interests with the user, just as it is done through SMS group messaging.
Jack claims that project actually took on the name 'Status' for quite a while. The brainstorming done for a fitting name began. 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'.
Inspired by the fact American short codes are five characters in length, twitter was originally referred to as 'twttr'. 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 rose to fame in the 2007 South by Southwest Festival that was 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.
Twitversity is an education course which uses video tutorials to teach Twitter for beginners. The tutorials allows beginners to become experts in 14 days or less. The first lesson is available as a free download.
