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The 2000s in America

Twitter

by Kerry Skemp

Definition: An online microblogging site where users can find and share information and messages in 140-character increments

Twitter enabled unprecedented real-time communication between people around the world, as well as widespread visibility into that communication.

Twitter is a microblogging service that allows users to respond—in 140 characters or less—to the website’s prompt” “What are you doing?” (later changed to “What’s happening?”). These updates are called “tweets” and displayed on a user’s Twitter profile. Users can follow updates from other users and reply to one another publicly (using an @ sign before the other user’s name) or privately through direct messages. It is also possible for users to “retweet” (reshare) another user’s commentary and “favorite” select tweets. Members can utilize privacy settings that limit who can see their tweets, but the default setting is public to facilitate discovery and exchange.

Features such as hashtags—which use the # symbol—allow users to follow a discussion on particular subjects and also help them find other like-minded people. Trending topics, added in April 2009, showcase current topics of discussion and popular hashtags. In 2009, Twitter lists enabled users to create public or private lists of users by topic.

Twitter has shown value on several fronts, primarily as a content sharing and discovery application. Unlike the social network Facebook, where users generally interact primarily with friends, Twitter is generally open. Any user can follow any other user, unless the user’s tweets are protected. This makes the service almost as concerned with the flow of information as the identity of the people exchanging it, and has led to many beneficial uses such as political activism and citizen journalism.

Origins

In 2006, employees at a podcasting platform called Odeo in San Francisco were asked to come up with new product ideas due to languishing consumer interest in the company’s core product. An employee named Jack Dorsey suggested working on a text message–based social status update system, an idea he had formed based on his interest in dispatch routing and experience routing cabs and bike messengers.

Dorsey tackled the idea with Odeo cofounder Noah Glass, a contract developer named Florian Weber, and Christopher “Biz” Stone. Glass is often credited with coming up with the name Twitter (initially styled Twttr). The initial concept was presented to the Odeo team in February 2006. Work on the project continued and Twitter was founded in March 2006 before being launched publicly in July.

In October 2006, Obvious Corporation was formed as a parent company for Twitter and the soon-to-be-dissolved Odeo after Odeo CEO Evan Williams bought back all shares from the company’s investors. Williams’s decision to regain control of Odeo without telling investors about Twitter was seen as questionable; some thought he should have disclosed more information or invited Odeo investors to invest in Twitter as well. Twitter has also been seen as failing to fully acknowledge the role of some Odeo employees, particularly Noah Glass, in the company’s beginnings.

Growth

Initially, Twitter was focused on text messaging; some called the service a “group text chat.” Early users, including Odeo employees, generated high cell phone bills by sending high volumes of text messages. The 140-character limit on tweet length was developed in part due to text messaging limitations.

In August 2006, an earthquake in San Francisco—where Twitter and many of its early users were located—was widely discussed on Twitter. This was a preview of how important real-time conversations would be to the service’s growth.

Twitter first saw broad exposure at the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference held in Austin, Texas. Many conference attendees started using the service if they had not been doing so already and spread the word to their colleagues and friends. Usage tripled from twenty thousand to sixty thousand daily tweets during SXSWi. Other major events in 2007, including the MTV Music Awards and the Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference, proved popular on Twitter.

The release of the iPhone in July 2007 boosted smartphone usage and enabled users to access Twitter directly from the web, rather than through texts. This increased Twitter’s popularity further, particularly among the tech-savvy set. Several iPhone apps were also developed to help users tweet on their phones. Usage grew from four hundred thousand tweets per quarter in 2007 to one hundred million tweets per quarter in 2008. The number of tweets may indicate usage more accurately than number of users because many people sign up for the service but never actually tweet. The vast majority of tweets (some estimates say 75 percent) come from a small percentage of overall users.

In October 2008, Dorsey stepped down and Williams became CEO. Later that fall, Twitter rejected an acquisition offer from Facebook. Twitter reached 1.3 million users by March 2008 and would grow to 6 million users by April 2009. The company’s revenue sources were unclear as of 2009, but many anticipated that it would offer some sort of advertising. The company was valued at $1 billion in that year. Investors included Union Square Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions.

Twitter acquired several companies, including Summize (search and filter) in July 2008, Values of n (social software design) in November 2008, and Mixer Labs (geolocation) in December 2009. All of these acquisitions could be seen as steps toward consolidating features and keeping users more closely integrated with the Twitter ecosystem. Other external tools were crucial in building interest, such as 2008’s TwitPic, a way to tweet pictures.

Twitter was created using the Ruby on Rails web development framework, MySQL database and a FlockDB graph database to connect users. Twitter developers have asserted that the system was built primarily as a content management system, not a messaging system. This led to frequent service outages when the system was overloaded, which was not corrected without major changes to the site’s architecture.

Uses and Restrictions

Despite some perception of Twitter as a tool for banal exchanges, the service was integral in supporting political activism and citizen journalism. One of the first and highest-profile instances of Twitter as a news tool took place in November 2008, when local updates about bomb attacks at a hotel in Mumbai, India, were widely shared on the service. Twitter’s potential for organizing protests led the Iranian government to block the service during its 2009 presidential elections; to support Iranian users, Twitter kept servers up at that critical time despite planned maintenance.

The service is also widely used during events such as sporting games, television shows, or awards ceremonies; the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing and 2008 presidential election were two examples of major events widely covered on Twitter. When pop star Michael Jackson died in June 2009, a record 456 tweets per second were sent about his passing, reflecting the growing importance of Twitter for sharing timely information.

Impact

Twitter changed the way that people interact, fostering shorter messages in real time, and enabling discovery across professional and geographic boundaries.

Citation Types

Type

Format

MLA 9th

Skemp, Kerry. "Twitter." The 2000s in America, edited by Craig Belanger, Salem Press, 2013. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=2000_0374.

APA 7th

Skemp, K. (2013). Twitter. In C. Belanger (Ed.), The 2000s in America. Salem Press.

CMOS 17th

Skemp, Kerry. "Twitter." Edited by Craig Belanger. The 2000s in America. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2013. Accessed September 18, 2025. online.salempress.com.

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