Twitter

Posted on December 20, 2008

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Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, or email, or through an application such as Tweetie, TwitterFon, Twitterrific, Feedalizr, and Facebook. Four gateway numbers are currently available for SMS: short codes for the United States, Canada, and India, and a United Kingdom-based number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email. Twitter had by one measure over 3 million accounts and, by another, well over 5 million visitors in September 2008, a fivefold increase in a month.

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, began as a research and development project inside San Francisco podcasting company Odeo in March 2006.

Odeo was co-founded by blogger (evhead.com) Evan Williams. In October, 2006 the company was bought out by management, and Williams, Stone, and other Odeo employees started another company named Obvious Corp. to operate Odeo and Twitter, another startup Williams had been testing in the offices for about a year. Twitter had been initially used internally by Odeo’s employees and became a product of Obvious at this time.

The service rapidly gained popularity: In March 2007, it won the 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category.[6] Dorsey, the man behind the concept of Twitter, gave the following playful acceptance speech at SXSW: “We’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!”
Evan Williams in 2007

In April 2007, Obvious spun off the service as a separate entity under the name Twitter, Inc., with Dorsey as CEO until 2008 when Williams replaced him.

“Summize” was an internet startup using the Twitter XMPP stream to allow users to search twitter conversations in near real-time. On 15 July 2008, Twitter acquired Summize and rolled it into their own site at the subdomain search.twitter.com. At the time of the sale, Summize had 6 employees, of which 5 went on to work at Twitter. CEO Jay Verdy moved on to a new project.