On March 21, 2006, at 9:50 in the evening, a 29-year-old software developer named Jack Dorsey typed five short words on a brand-new website he'd helped invent: "just setting up my twttr." That was it. The first tweet ever. The site didn't even have all its vowels yet - Twitter was originally spelled "twttr" because the founders were copying the short five-letter style of Flickr. Tweets were limited to 140 characters because that was the maximum length of a text message back then.
Dorsey had been working at a small podcast company called Odeo in San Francisco when he sketched out his idea: a service that let you send a quick status update to a group of friends, like a tiny public diary. The team built a prototype in two weeks. For the first few months, Twitter was just used by Odeo employees and their friends. Then in 2007, the company set up huge screens at a tech conference called South by Southwest, and tweet traffic exploded as the conference crowd started sending messages back and forth.
Within a decade, Twitter had hundreds of millions of users, was used to organize protests, break news, and let world leaders, athletes, and celebrities talk directly to anyone with a phone. Astronauts have tweeted from space. Tweets have toppled governments and made people famous overnight. The company was renamed X in 2023 after a new owner bought it. But that first tweet, six words tapped out by a curious young developer in San Francisco, is still floating around online today - the tiny pebble that started a worldwide avalanche of chatter.
