If you look at the official history books, they’ll tell you a neat little story. They say Twitter was born in March 2006. Simple, right? But honestly, if you were sitting in that cramped San Francisco office back then, it didn’t feel like a "birth." It felt more like a desperate pivot from a failing podcasting company.
The real answer to when was Twitter founded isn't just a single date on a calendar. It's a series of messy events involving backstabbing, a dictionary, and a lot of SMS text messages.
The Odeo Crisis and the "Side Project"
Back in 2005, a company called Odeo was trying to make podcasting a thing. It was led by Evan Williams (who had already hit it big with Blogger) and Noah Glass. Then Apple dropped a bomb. They announced that iTunes would include a podcasting platform. Just like that, Odeo was basically dead in the water.
The team was panicked. They started holding "hackathons" to find a new direction. During one of these sessions in February 2006, an engineer named Jack Dorsey pitched an idea. He wanted a way to use SMS to send a small status update to a group of friends.
It was essentially a way to say, "I’m at the coffee shop," or "I'm heading home."
Jack had been obsessed with "dispatch" systems—how taxis and ambulances communicate—for years. He’d even written some code for it as a student at NYU. Noah Glass loved the idea. He’s actually the one who came up with the name. He spent hours looking through the dictionary and found "twitter," which meant "a short burst of inconsequential information."
The vowels were dropped at first. They called it "twttr" because they liked the look of Flickr and because the domain twitter.com was already taken.
When Was Twitter Founded? The Key Dates
While the brainstorming happened in February, the first real "action" took place in March.
- March 21, 2006: This is the big one. At 9:50 PM, Jack Dorsey sent the first-ever tweet: "just setting up my twttr."
- July 15, 2006: The service finally went public. TechCrunch wrote about it, and people mostly made fun of it. They thought it was a useless tool for narcissists.
- April 2007: This is when Twitter, Inc. actually became its own corporate entity, spinning off from the remnants of Odeo.
The 140-Character Limit Wasn't About "Brevity"
Everyone thinks the character limit was a creative choice to keep things snappy. Kinda. But it was mostly a technical limitation.
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SMS messages were capped at 160 characters. The founders decided to save 20 characters for the username and give users 140 for the content. It was a hack. They didn't want the carrier to split the message into two separate texts, which would cost more money.
They eventually doubled it to 280 in 2017, but for a decade, that 140-character constraint defined an entire generation of internet culture.
The Tipping Point: SXSW 2007
For the first year, Twitter was a ghost town. It had maybe a few thousand users. Then came South by Southwest (SXSW) in March 2007.
The Twitter team did something brilliant. They put up two 60-inch plasma screens in the hallways of the conference. They streamed live tweets from people at the event. Suddenly, everyone was using it to find out which parties were good or which panels were boring.
Usage tripled in one weekend. They went from 20,000 tweets a day to 60,000. It was the moment the world realized this wasn't just a toy; it was a real-time news wire.
The Founder You’ve Never Heard Of
If you look at the "official" list of founders, you'll see Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. But there’s a fourth man: Noah Glass.
Noah was the heart of the early project. He was the one who believed in it when Evan Williams was skeptical. Yet, right as the company was taking off, Williams fired him. He was essentially erased from the company’s history for years. It’s one of the darker chapters of the Silicon Valley story.
It’s a reminder that tech history is often written by the people who stay, not necessarily the people who started it.
From "Twttr" to "X"
We can’t talk about the founding without mentioning what happened recently. In 2022, Elon Musk bought the platform for $44 billion. In 2023, he officially killed the bird logo and rebranded the whole thing to "X."
He wanted to turn it into an "everything app," similar to WeChat in China. The name change was controversial, to say the least. Many people still call it Twitter. Honestly, it’s hard to break nearly 20 years of habit.
What You Can Learn From the Twitter Story
The founding of Twitter wasn't a stroke of genius. It was a recovery from a failure. If Odeo had been successful, we would probably be listening to Odeo podcasts right now instead of scrolling through "X."
Here are a few takeaways if you're looking at the history for inspiration:
- Pivoting is everything: Don't be afraid to scrap a bad idea for a small, weird one.
- Constraints breed creativity: The 140-character limit was a bug that became a feature.
- Timing is luck: If they hadn't been at SXSW in 2007, the app might have died.
If you want to dive deeper into this, I highly recommend reading Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton. It’s the best account of the internal wars and the true timeline of how it all went down. It makes the "official" version look like a fairy tale.
Check your old archives or use the Wayback Machine to see what the site looked like in 2006. It’s unrecognizable. The "What are you doing?" prompt that started it all is a far cry from the global political engine it became.
Take a look at your own first tweet if you still have access to your account. Most of us were just "setting up our twttr" too.