Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system

Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features

SUBSCRIBE TODAY

In early 2006, Jack Dorsey - a 29-year-old tech entrepreneur at a San Francisco podcasting company called Odeo (which was later renamed Obvious Corporation) - told his boss Evan Williams about a very simple idea.

The firm was struggling and employees needed a faster way to share information with each other online, so Jack suggested creating an SMS-like group platform where team members could quickly update each other in real time.

The green light was given and the side-project was duly developed.

The new system needed a name and Jack's colleague, Noah Glass, suggested 'Twitter' because it neatly summed up the chattering nature of the application. The domain name, however, was taken so they removed the vowels and dubbed it 'Twttr' instead.

At 12.50pm on 21 March 2006, Dorsey posted what would become history's first 'tweet'. "Just setting up my twttr", he wrote. Soon, Odeo employees were spending every spare moment exchanging humorous banter online.

Realising its wider market potential, in July 2006, Odeo launched the product to the waiting world. Michael Arrington, a journalist at Tech Crunch in California, observed that "people are using it to send messages like 'cleaning my apartment' and 'hungry'". But he also noticed a rather glaring privacy issue.

Everyone on Twttr had a public page, which meant that all their posts could be read by complete strangers. As Arrington mused in a classic case of 'how wrong can you be': "I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website."

In fact, people did not mind one little bit - and, with the domain name 'Twitter' now purchased, the microblogging website soon took off.

The timing could not have been better.

The Good Old Days

Three months later, on 9 January 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs took to the stage at the Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco and declared that, as of "today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone".

The new device would not just be a mobile but a media player too, and when the iPhone went on sale in June that year, it was nothing short of a revolution. Smartphones swiftly became ubiquitous and, as they did, Twitter and its rivals grew.

In 2005, just 5% of Americans were using some form of social media. By the start of 2010, the figure had spiralled to 65%. And just three years later, 75% of all Americans were looking up old friends on Facebook, or watching cats fall out of trees on YouTube, or arguing with complete strangers about the shape of the Earth on Twitter.

In fact, Twitter grew more slowly than its rivals - and there was a reason for that. The platform required concentration and practice. Users needed to distil their musings to a maximum 140 characters and there was a haiku-like art to writing the perfect tweet.

As such, it attracted a more discerning crowd.

A 2013 Pew Research study found that nearly half (45%) of Twitter users were between the ages of 18 and 29, and about the same number had a higher education qualification.

Research by Oxford University in 2016 found much the same result in the UK, where Twitter users tended to be younger, better paid, and better educated.

From Maggie to MAGA: The Transformation of the Conservative Mind

James Bloodworth examines how the rise of the radical-right is not a sudden aberration but the product of decades of neoliberal policy and the collapse of alternatives

James Bloodworth

The site quickly developed a reputation for being the place where intelligent discourse happened and, in those very early years, it had a strong sense of community.

The introduction of the hashtag - # - as a means of filtering conversations in 2007 not only allowed people with common interests to find each other, but also served as an easy way to curate content. More importantly, it soon became apparent that it provided a...