Twitter started as twttr. It was a text messages broadcasting app by people from Odeo.
Odeo was Noah Glass' podcast platform. When Apple launched iTunes, Odeo began to fall rapidly - nobody needed a podcasts-only app. Glass and his team started organizing hackathons to save the business. One of Odeo's workers, Jack Dorsey, came up with the idea of twttr, a new Odeo product. Glass liked and supported that.
At first, twttr was meant for teamwork and internal communication, but soon media like TechCrunch picked up the trace. It gave twttr its first thousands of users. Once the guys bought the Twitter.com domain, they changed their product's name to Twitter as we know it today.
Twitter launched on July 15, 2006. Cofounder Evan Williams later said it went out "to a whimper." The moment that actually moved the needle came eight months later, at South by Southwest 2007 in Austin. Williams said the team targeted the festival on purpose because a lot of Twitter's early adopters already had it on their calendar.
Instead of a booth on the trade-show floor, Twitter paid $11,000 to put screens in the convention-center hallways, the space Williams said was where the real action happened. "We paid $11K for this and set up the TVs ourselves," he said. "This was about the only money Twitter's ever spent on marketing." They also let people join just for the conference: texting "join sxsw" to Twitter's short code added you as a follower of a handful of ambassadors at the event, and your tweets showed up on those hallway screens.
- Tweets ran around 20,000 a day going into SXSW 2007.
- That climbed to roughly 60,000 a day during the festival, about triple.
- Williams credited the hallway screens and the resulting word of mouth, not the short code, for the jump.