Imagine a scenario where you’re gainfully employed but spending your nights and weekends working on a side project.
It’s just something you’ve been mashing together in your free time with a few friends at work.
This is the history ofX (formerly Twitter).
Dorsey had originally imagined Twitter as anSMS-basedcommunications platform.
Groups of friends could keep tabs on what each other were doing based on their status updates.
Like texting, but not.
In its early days, Twitter was referred to astwttr.
It read, “just setting up my twttr [sic].”
Dorsey’s first tweet was sold as a nonfungible token (NFT) for $2.9 million in 2021.
It was purchased by a buyer using ether cryptocurrency.
Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, and other members of the Odeo staff facilitated the buyback.
By doing this, they acquired the rights to the Twitter platform.
There is some controversy surrounding how this all took place.
Whether Odeo investors knew the full scope of the Twitter platform is questionable.
Twitter Achieves Explosive Growth
Twitter was now on the cusp of its biggest growth spurt.
The 2007 South By Southwest (@sxsw) Interactive conference saw a huge explosion of Twitter usage.
More than 60,000 tweets were sent per day at the event.
Twitter had its fair share of growing pains during its formative years.
Twitter’s user base grew at astounding rates and quite frequently the service would be over capacity.
When servers overloaded, anillustration by artist Yiying Lu(@YiyingLu) appeared on the screen.
The illustration featured a whale being lifted out of the water to safety by eight birds.
This error page went viral within the Twitter community and soon was dubbed the “Fail Whale.”
Is It a 140-Character Limit or 280-Character Limit?
The reason Twitter imposes a character limit on tweets is that it was originally designed as an SMS-based platform.
As Twitter eventually grew into a web platform, the 140-character limit remained as a matter of branding.
The character increase was designed to help Twitter users spend less time condensing their thoughts and more time talking.
Think of it as innovation borne of necessity.
Initially, users had no way of replying to one another on Twitter.
Some users would include an @ symbol before a username to identify another user within a Tweet.
The same thing happened withhashtags, which are now an integral part of the Twitter ecosystem.
This user-driven functionality is also the source of retweets.
Users started to addRTbefore sending the message, signaling to their followers that the following tweet was a report.
In August 2010, this functionality was officially added to the platform.
Still, users increased, bots and otherwise.
Eventually, however, the deal closed.
The site and app started having regular issues, reports of bot activity increased, and user moderation plummeted.
These and more issues led to the advent ofa variety of Twitter alternatives.
Some include Instagram Threads, Hive Social, and Bluesky.
In 2023, Musk announced that the long-used Twitter name was going away.
The new name and logo, X, then replaced the iconic bird on the website.
