Twitter began as twttr, a side project inside a podcast company
Before it was X, and before it was even Twitter, the service was called twttr. The vowel-free name, credited to co-founder Noah Glass, echoed Flickr and the five-digit text message codes used in the United States. The team only bought the twitter.com domain six months after launch, because someone else already owned it.
Work started in February 2006 at Odeo, a podcasting firm. Jack Dorsey pitched the idea of sending a text message to a small group, and his first prototype, built with contractor Florian Weber, served as an internal tool for Odeo staff. It went public on 15 July 2006. Glass was later fired by Evan Williams and stayed quiet about his role until 2011. Twitter became a company of its own in April 2007.
Its breakthrough came at the South by Southwest conference in 2007, where daily posts tripled from 20,000 to 60,000. Growth then snowballed. By June 2010 about 750 tweets were going out every second, and on its sixth birthday in March 2012 the service counted 140 million users sending 340 million messages a day.
Brevity defined it. Posts were capped at 140 characters, a limit that came from the service's text message roots and was doubled to 280 in 2017. Subscribers gained far longer posts in 2023. Activity has always been lopsided: one tenth of users write more than 80% of the tweets, and a 2020 estimate suggested about 48 million accounts, some 15% of the total, were run by bots.
Ownership has changed repeatedly. Elon Musk bought the company for $44 billion in October 2022, and the next July announced it would become X, retiring the bird logo. His artificial intelligence company xAI took it over in 2025, and SpaceX then acquired xAI in February 2026, the sixth change of hands for the platform.
Source: X (social network)
