2006: Twitter launched as an SMS service
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July of that year. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 200 million users as of 2011, generating over 200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.
Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group.
The original project code name for the service was twttr, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes.
Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message "just setting up my twttr".
"...we came across the word 'twitter', and it was just perfect. The definition was 'a short burst of inconsequential information,' and 'chirps from birds'. And that's exactly what the product was." – Jack Dorsey
Tim Berners-Lee published the first ever website on 6 August 1991 - we look back at some of the key milestones of the past 20 years that have helped to make the web such a ubiquitous part of everyday life.
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