Starting in ?? on 3/21 and moving across the ?, we thank you for 10 incredible years.
Love, Twitter#LoveTwitterhttps://t.co/pH4WWdgK6q
— Twitter (@Twitter) March 20, 2016
Twitter is 10!!!
On March 21, 2006, a small team at a podcasting startup in San Francisco tested a simple product. It was a texting megaphone: Send an SMS message to the number 40404, and the service would forward it to all your friends.
After that, the historical record gets cloudier. The four men with some responsibility for the digital doodad were Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass. They called it Twitter, because using it felt amusing and insubstantial, but they spelled it twttr, because vowels were still out of fashion in startup names. Also, Twitter.com was taken.
That afternoon, Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet:
just setting up my twttr
— jack (@jack) March 21, 2006
Today is the 10th birthday of that tweet. Dorsey, then an undergrad at New York University, later the company’s first CEO, is now CEO again. Twitter is no longer a small, quirky, unprofitable startup, but a big, famous, unprofitable corporation. And, having come in for a beating recently, it is thrilled to have a self-evidently positive PR event like a double-digit birthday. It’s releasing GIFs and blog posts and data visualizations to celebrate.
Users celebrates with tweet
#LoveTwitter and the big and colorful flock of all Bosch accounts! https://t.co/kbvFJNv3gg pic.twitter.com/XnPSQ9LL8a
— BoschGlobal (@BoschGlobal) March 21, 2016
Birthday cake time @TwitterUK ??? #LoveTwitter pic.twitter.com/sC28N3Vr4H
— Rebecca Welley (@RebeccaW) March 21, 2016
Cake cake cake cake cake #LoveTwitter #? pic.twitter.com/BvTSPt7rjM
— Amanda Hascoe (@alhascoe) March 21, 2016
Twitter is where I get to share my euphoria and depression with complete strangers over our common obsession – Arsenal FC #LoveTwitter
— Nothing to see here. (@habbizzelle) March 21, 2016
Met my wife on Twitter #LoveTwitter
— Felonious Munk has a Phd from the streets (@Felonious_munk) March 21, 2016
https://twitter.com/justicearnab/status/711945268460019712