Twitter Launched

The status has the ID 20. Its author has the user ID 12. Twitter's own servers still return its creation time to the second: 20:50:14 UTC on 21 March 2006, which was ten to one in the afternoon in San Francisco. The text is five words long and lowercase, and the service it names is spelled without vowels.

It was not a public launch. The service would not open to outsiders for almost four months.

A Side Project Inside Odeo

Twitter began inside Odeo, a San Francisco podcasting start-up co-founded by Noah Glass and Evan Williams. Development of the new service started in early 2006. Jack Dorsey, then working at Odeo, brought the core idea—short status updates broadcast to a group—to a company brainstorming session. Glass is credited with the original name, "twttr", in the vowel-dropping style of Flickr; Biz Stone was among the small team that built it. The people usually credited as its founders are Dorsey, Glass, Stone and Williams.

The first prototype, built by Dorsey and the contractor Florian Weber, was used as an internal service for Odeo employees. Dorsey's message from 21 March was posted on it.

Why 140 Characters

The constraint that defined Twitter for more than a decade came from the telephone network, not from design taste. Early Twitter was meant to work over text messages, and HISTORY.com's account of the launch puts it simply: the founders imposed a 140-character limit "based on the maximum length of text messages at the time".

The limit outlived its reason. By the 2010s most people used Twitter from smartphone apps rather than by text message, but the 140-character form had become the product.

Public Launch and SXSW

The service opened to the public on 15 July 2006, released by Odeo. In October 2006 a new company, Obvious Corporation, bought back Odeo and its assets, including Twitter; in April 2007 Twitter was spun off as a company of its own. According to Wikipedia's account, the team bought the domain and renamed the service Twitter about six months after the launch of twttr.

The moment usually given for Twitter's breakout is the South by Southwest conference in Austin in March 2007, when daily traffic jumped from about 20,000 tweets to 60,000. The convention of marking topics with a hashtag was introduced by Chris Messina the same year; according to Wikipedia's history of the company, he had to persuade Twitter's executives before they agreed to try it.

140 to 280

On 7 November 2017 Twitter announced that it was doubling the limit to 280 characters after a test that began in September. Its blog post gave the reason with data: historically, 9 percent of tweets in English hit the 140-character limit, and with 280 characters that fell to 1 percent.

The change was not universal. A footnote to the announcement said that Japanese, Korean and Chinese "will continue to have 140 characters because cramming is not an issue in these languages"—their writing systems pack more meaning into each character. For Japanese users, the limit set in 2006 never changed.

What Twitter Became

Twitter's importance did not rest on its size. It lay in being public by default and in real time. A tweet could be read by anyone, quoted by anyone and searched by anyone within seconds, which made it the place where journalists, politicians, companies and activists met. That combination made it central to breaking news, to the protest movements of the 2010s and to political communication, and it also made it a vector for harassment and coordinated manipulation.

Musk and X

On 27 October 2022, Elon Musk completed his acquisition of the company. Twitter's filing with the SEC that day records that it had become a wholly owned subsidiary of X Holdings I, Inc., an entity controlled by Musk, that shareholders would receive $54.20 a share in cash, and that trading on the New York Stock Exchange was suspended before the market opened on 28 October. The deal is usually valued at about US$44 billion; the story of how it happened is told on its own page, Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter.

On 23 July 2023 Musk and the chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, announced that Twitter would become X, and on 24 July the bird logo was replaced. The domain x.com—a name Musk had used for an online bank he founded in 1999—now carries the service.

The first tweet is still online under the new name, at x.com/jack/status/20. Its URL is about the only thing in this story that has not changed. For the organization's history, and for the social platforms that grew up alongside it, see Facebook and YouTube.