In the beginning was the Tweet ‘message’

On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, made a call to his assistant Thomas Watson: “Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you.” Those nine words were the first ever to be spoken on a telephone.

On March 22, 2006, Jack Dorsey, an engineer in a pod-casting company called Odeo, posted a five-word message –– ‘just setting up my twttr’ –– on the newly set-up platform called twttr. This was the “Mr Watson…” line of the communication tool that is today universally known as Twitter.

Now, 140 years after the invention of the telephone, this 140-character communication platform has completed a decade of operations.

In March 2011, Jack explained the initial days of Twitter in 139 characters. It said: “The team was small: @Noah came up with the name & managed, @florian & I programmed, @Biz designed, all under the roof of Odeo & @Ev. #twttr”

(Noah Glass was one of the co-founders of Odeo. Florian Weber’s Twitter page [@csshsh] mentions him as the first engineer of Twitter. Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey are the co-founders of Twitter. Ev Williams is the co-founder of Odeo and Twitter.)

Messages posted on Twitter are called ‘tweets’ today, but the initial team of users used various other terms then. While Biz Stone called it ‘Twttring’, other users called it a ‘message’.

The symbol @ was not part of the username in the initial days of the platform.

Twitter was born in a hackathon conducted by Ev at his company Odeo.

In a July 2006 post on his personal blog, he explained Twitter thus: “Today Odeo released a new product/service/website we call ‘twitter’ (but we spell, Twttr ).

“It's a mobile/web social, lightweight/ real-time/ present-tense blogging tool, with the primary interface being through SMS,” he said.

In his book Things A Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of a Creative Mind , Biz Stone says that one of the first decisions made about Twitter was that the “message” would be limited to 140 characters.

“Constraint inspires creativity. Embrace your constraints, whether they are creative, physical, economic, or self-imposed. They are provocative. They are challenging... They make you more creative,” he says. Curiously, the character limit set for each tweet may have contributed to Twitter’s success: in the early days it was one of the most talked-about features of Twitter, he adds.

But it was Noah Glass who is credited with coining the name Twitter.

Speaking at the DomainFest in Santa Monica in 2012, Biz explained that the co-founders of the micro-blogging platform wanted a name that suggested a sense ofurgency. The first suggestion was ‘jitter’. Since it sounded negative, they gave it up.

Noah Glass, who was poring through a dictionary, came up with ‘Twitter’.

Biz, whose wife used to take care of animals and birds at their home, knew that ‘twitter’ described the short personal communication that birds use to communicate. However, the domain name Twitter.com had been taken up by a bird enthusiast. And for almost six months, the platform was known as twttr.

In a post on his personal blog on September 8, 2006, Ev Williams announced the launch of Twitter.

The post said: “Last night we launched a brand new Twitter (which is now officially Twitter, not Twttr). Besides lengthening the name, we gave it a fresh new visual design…”

The founders paid $7,500 to buy the domain name.

If March 2006 witnessed the birth of Twitter, March 2007 was the turning point for the start-up. The event that proved a trigger for this was the South by South West Interactive, or SXSW as it is known, in Austin. It is an event to which geeks from the movie, music and the tech world flocked to track new trends and developments.

The co-founders were pinning their hopes on this event to take Twitter to greater heights.

Ev suggested that the team set up big flat screen visual displays on the hallways instead of the conference room, where the attendees could see real-time tweets on SXSW. However, this experiment was going to cost $10,000.

By sending a text message, 'JoinSXSW', to 40404, they could see the tweets relating to SXSW on the flat-screens. This was all before start of the hashtag (#) trend, which could collate tweets according to a particular topic. The Twitter team also had to face challenges in configuring the big screens for display and, subsequently, the server crash at their San Francisco office.

But all these efforts yielded big paybacks: tweets were the ‘in thing’ at the event.

And this most happening social media platform was nominated for the Web awards at that event, and won it.

True to the style of Twitter, Jack’s ‘acceptance speech’ was limited to less than 140 characters. He said: “We’d like to thank you in one hundred forty characters or less. And we just did!”

In his book, Biz compared the behaviour of Twitter users to that of a flock of birds. He says that each bird watches its neighbouring bird's shoulder and simply follows that spot.

“Twitter was creating the same effect. Simple communication, in real time, had allowed the many to suddenly, for a few seconds, become one. Then, just as quickly, they became individuals again.”

Pre-SXSW, Twitter had seven employees and 45,000 users. By the end of 2007, it had 16 employees and 6.85 lakh registered users.

This little bird has given a new direction to the way the world communicates.

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