Twitter has become one of the most popular social media platforms of today, with over 320 million monthly users worldwide. Like many other social media platforms, Twitter had very humble beginnings and started as just an idea by the co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2006. At the time Dorsey had been working the podcasting company, Odeo. It was at a brainstorming session at Odeo that Dorsey first pitched the idea of an SMS-based communications platform to Odeo’s co-founder Evan Williams. Williams and his partner Biz Stone were intrigued by the idea and gave Dorsey the go-ahead to spend more time developing this revolutionary social media platform. Jack Dorsey sent out the first tweet ever on March 21, 2006, with the simple message, “just setting up my twttr.” Notice that there are no vowels in Dorsey’s original spelling of Twitter. This was not an accident, it was actually a popular trend of the time to drop the vowels in the name of companies and services in an effort to gain a domain name advantage. Twttr was the original name of the infamous social media platform, however, this name didn’t last long and the name was soon changed to its current spelling.
Growth of Twitter remained fairly slow for the first year of its existence, but in 2007 the South by Southwest interactive conference saw a huge explosion of Twitter usage. Each day there was more than 60,000 sent out from the conference, creating an enormous sense of popularity for the social media platform practically overnight. After the 2007 SXSW conference, Twitter gained even more popularity and before long, the young social media platform began competing with the already established Facebook. This rise in popularity didn’t come with a fair share of growing pains. Because Twitter membership was growing at exponential rates, the service would quite frequently experience overcapacity. When this happened, the servers would become overloaded and cause the social platform to crash. Rather than doing nothing at all or providing a boring error message, the Twitter team used an illustration of a whale being lifted out of the water to safety by eight birds. The reasoning behind having this image appear on the screen in the event of a crash was to symbolize the acknowledgment of the problem and that the Twitter team was working to solve the problem. This error image quickly went viral within the Twitter community and was even dubbed the “Fail Whale.”
It’s because of this level of creativity and innovation that Twitter has become the social media giant it is today. Twitter has always been a user-oriented social media platform and many of the changes Twitter has experienced over the years are a direct result of users taking matters into their own hands. Users were the first to include an @ symbol in tweets to reply to others on Twitter. This became such a popular trend on Twitter that Twitter team eventually added this feature permanently. A similar trend happened with hashtags and retweets. Users began adding “RT” before their message, signaling to their followers that the tweet was a report of someone else’s tweet. Adding these user-generated functions only increased the popularity of the platform because users felt that the Twitter team truly understood the wants and needs of the users.
Twitter has become one of the most popular social media platforms of today, with over 320 million monthly users worldwide. Like many other social media platforms, Twitter had very humble beginnings and started as just an idea by the co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2006. At the time Dorsey had been working the podcasting company, Odeo. It was at a brainstorming session at Odeo that Dorsey first pitched the idea of an SMS-based communications platform to Odeo’s co-founder Evan Williams. Williams and his partner Biz Stone were intrigued by the idea and gave Dorsey the go-ahead to spend more time developing this revolutionary social media platform. Jack Dorsey sent out the first tweet ever on March 21, 2006, with the simple message, “just setting up my twttr.” Notice that there are no vowels in Dorsey’s original spelling of Twitter. This was not an accident, it was actually a popular trend of the time to drop the vowels in the name of companies and services in an effort to gain a domain name advantage. Twttr was the original name of the infamous social media platform, however, this name didn’t last long and the name was soon changed to its current spelling.
Growth of Twitter remained fairly slow for the first year of its existence, but in 2007 the South by Southwest interactive conference saw a huge explosion of Twitter usage. Each day there was more than 60,000 sent out from the conference, creating an enormous sense of popularity for the social media platform practically overnight. After the 2007 SXSW conference, Twitter gained even more popularity and before long, the young social media platform began competing with the already established Facebook. This rise in popularity didn’t come with a fair share of growing pains. Because Twitter membership was growing at exponential rates, the service would quite frequently experience overcapacity. When this happened, the servers would become overloaded and cause the social platform to crash. Rather than doing nothing at all or providing a boring error message, the Twitter team used an illustration of a whale being lifted out of the water to safety by eight birds. The reasoning behind having this image appear on the screen in the event of a crash was to symbolize the acknowledgment of the problem and that the Twitter team was working to solve the problem. This error image quickly went viral within the Twitter community and was even dubbed the “Fail Whale.” 
It’s because of this level of creativity and innovation that Twitter has become the social media giant it is today. Twitter has always been a user-oriented social media platform and many of the changes Twitter has experienced over the years are a direct result of users taking matters into their own hands. Users were the first to include an @ symbol in tweets to reply to others on Twitter. This became such a popular trend on Twitter that Twitter team eventually added this feature permanently. A similar trend happened with hashtags and retweets. Users began adding “RT” before their message, signaling to their followers that the tweet was a report of someone else’s tweet. Adding these user-generated functions only increased the popularity of the platform because users felt that the Twitter team truly understood the wants and needs of the users.
Glad they didn't stick with "twttr". That would have been a dumb name.
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