Who Invented Twitter? An Overview of the Major Players
Twitter is an instantly recognizable name that many people are familiar with, but have you ever wondered who invented it? It is a social media platform with more than 330 million users that is used to post short messages, usually limited to 280 characters in length, from the perspective of the user. Although it is easy to use and has many millions of users, not many people know the history behind Twitter; who it was that created it, who all was involved, and how did it manage to come to life? Here, we will examine all the major players (and some minor ones) that led to the invention of Twitter.
The Early Odeo Years
Odeo was an early and now-defunct podcasting platform that was created and founded by the now Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, while the company’s other co-founder Jack Dorsey was still at college. Williams and his partners had raised $1.5 million in preparation to launch Odeo in 2005. Shortly thereafter, however, Apple announced iTunes and the launch of the iPod’s podcasting capabilities which quickly caused the Odeo user base to decline. This put the future of the platform and the company in jeopardy.
Jack Dorsey Joins the Team
Williams started to look for potential solutions, and Jack Dorsey was suggested to him from a mutual friend. A San Francisco-based computer programmer, Dorsey had already developed a dispatch-tracking application for die-hard San Francisco taxi users. In the midst of the Odeo crisis, he was brought on board, and just a few months after joining the team, he submitted his now-famous idea: to design status updates or ‘tweets’ that summed up a person’s life in a sentence or two.
The Biz Stone-Noah Glass Collaboration
Jack Dorsey was not the only one who was involved with inventing the platform. Another member of the Odeo team, Noah Glass, had also approached Williams with a solution of his own: to create a service with incredibly short messages ‘as short as two-words or two-characters.’ Glass then went on to recruit Biz Stone, another computer scientist and former Odeo employee, to work on the platform. Stone was the brains behind the utilitarian yet friendly web interface that allowed users to be able to log in successfully and post tweets from the homepage.
The Creation of Twitter
In March 2006, the team led by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams (with assistance also from Glass) finally created Twitter. While the name was with some degree of chance — the original name was going to be Status. The idea was novel, and it took off incredibly quickly. By Septemeber 2007, the platform had already accumulated more than 400,000 users. By April of 2008, 7 million users had already signed up and more than 60 million had followed by March 2009.
The Later Years
The success of Twitter did not go unnoticed, and it was soon acquired by the social media company, Facebook. Since then, the company has changed its focus from a short message service provider to a platform for brand promotion as well as a news platform. Twitter continues to grow today and is now worth some $13 billion, so it’s no surprise that the three inventors, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone, are now millionaires.
Twitter is now one of the largest and most popular social media platforms in the world, with more than 330 million users. Its success was a direct result of the collaboration between Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass. Without their vision and dedication, Twitter likely never would have come to be. Their initiative and expertise led to the sprawling platform that we see before us today and which continues to grow, transform, and evolve as the years and decades go by.