The Origin Of Twitter

The popular short messaging and status update network, Twitter, has had a meteoric rise to fame. While the social network’s story isn’t as dramatic as Facebook’s history, the initial concept behind Twitter is very interesting.

Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey, had a vested interested in Instant Messaging which soon led to the birth of Twitter in 2006. Dorsey was captivated by the status update function of AIM and constantly changed his status while following his friend’s status changes (sound familiar yet?) The idea of updating your status to a group of friends — the first concept of Twitter — was cultivated from the chronological timelines of LiveJournal posts and consecutive status updates:

I loved seeing at a glance my friends status updates. But I also really appreciated at the same time the dispatch aspect, where you’re out in the world doing something away from the keyboard and IM did not allow that,” said Dorsey. “I had a RIM pager, the 850, the first email device. I programed a system where I could fire off an email from that and set my status from anywhere. And it worked! And I was able to also at a regular interval pull my buddy list and get those updates sent to my email address. It was awesome! But the number of people who had those mobile devices was so minimal that the timing was just not right. This was 2001.”