The Origins and History of Twitter

Here’s a great article about how Twitter was born from the trials and tribulations of a group of young entrepreneurs. Written by one of the early developers of Twitter, this is inspirational for startups and showcases how an idea can be translated into a worthy web service with some hard work. The picture above shows what the early twitter looks like.

The interaction model and the visual metaphor for the service were constantly in flux. The meaning of being someone’s “Friend” versus “Following” someone changed regularly. At that point, you could either get all SMS messages or get none. There was no Twictionary back then; data in the system were referred to as “posts” or just “messages”. The lack of clear terminology led to some pretty spirited debates leading up to the Spring of 2006.