It might be hard to imagine a time before Twitter, but several years ago, the micro-blogging site was just getting started. To celebrate the five-year anniversary of when his team started programming Twitter, co-founder Jack Dorsey will be tweeting over the next two weeks about Twitter's origins.
Though many people believe that Twitter launched at SXSW, the service actually got its start nine months earlier – "to a whimper," co-founder Evan Williams wrote on Quora. But at SXSW 2007, the company paid $11,000 to set up flat-panel TVs in the hallway, and created a SXSW-specific number to which people could send messages, which then showed up on the TVs.
"I don't know what was the most important factor, but networks are all about critical mass, so doubling down on the momentum seemed like a good idea. And something clicked," Williams wrote.
For Dorsey, however, the original idea goes back even further – he drew the original idea on a notepad around 2001 and dubbed it stat.us. That eventually evolved into Twitter. "The name Twitter came from @Noah Glass & the Oxford English: 'a short inconsequential burst of information, chirps from birds,'" Dorsey wrote.
Initially, the team wanted to focus on mobile, so they dropped the vowels to get the TWTTR SMS shortcode. "Too bad Teen People owned it," Dorsey tweeted.
On March 13, 2006, the Twitter implementation started; eight days later, the first tweet went live. "Inviting coworkers," Dorsey tweeted on March 21.
"The team was small: @Noah came up with the name & managed, @florian & I programmed, @Biz designed, all under the roof of Odeo & @Ev," Dorsey wrote.
Dorsey posted some screen shots of the original Twitter. It was called twttr, with "an odeo thingy" as its tagline. Followers were "friends," protected mode was "extra secret mode," and the sign-up process just needed a mobile phone number.
"I wish it was still this easy," Dorsey wrote.
Five years ago today, he said, there was a Twitter design, log-in, and update. Now, the service has over 200 million registered users, and no signs of slowing down. Twitter on Monday released some stats about how the service has grown.
It took three years, two months, and one day to get to the billionth tweet. Now, it takes about one week for users to send one billion tweets, Twitter said. Last year, Twitter users sent about 50 million tweets per day; that is now at 140 million. On March 11, Twitter users sent 177 million tweets.
On the day Michael Jackson died - June 25, 2009 - users set a record by tweeting 456 tweets per second. The current record is seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year's Day, when users sent 6,939 tweets per second.
There were 572,000 new accounts created on March 12, and there is an average of 460,000 new accounts created every day over the last month. There has also been a 182 percent increase in the number of mobile users over the last year.
Dorsey promised more on Twitter's history in the days ahead. Follow him via twitter.com/jack. For some of the screen shots he released, see the slideshow above.