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Twitt-twitter-ooo, Twitter is four years old

TWITTER is four years old this week. The little bird, brain-child of Jack Dorsey, was born on March 21, 2006, with a tweet from creator Jack Dorsey, "just setting up my twittr."

Twitter was born out of podcasting company Odeo and evolved out of a brainstorming held by board members. During the session, Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group.

"We did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word "twitch," because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But "twitch" is not a good product name because it doesn't bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word "twitter," and it was just perfect."

The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees, later launching into a full-scale version in July 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all of its assets from the investors and other shareholders. Twitter later spun off as a separate company in April 2007.

Twitter really started taking off a year later at the 2007 SXSW conference, where it became an instant hit and won the Web Award. It has since become a hip service for the tech-savvy crowd, adding more and more users, although it remained relatively small for almost two more years. Now 600 tweets fly through Twitter's network every second.

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