Today in 2006, news coverage of Twitter broke for the first time.
Om Malik wrote on GigaOm
Dodgeball is so New York! In Silicon Valley, it’s all Twttr!
Twttr is a new mobile social networking application written by Noah Glass (and team), an Odeo-guy, a long time compadre of Blogger founder Ev Williams. (Twttr is a side project.) It is not a very complicated application – and which is what makes it so addictive and at the same time annoying.
Twttr has married Short Code Messaging, SMS with a way to create social groups. By sending a text message to a short code (for TWTTR) you can send your location information, your mood information or whatever and share it with people who are on your social-mob! Best part – no installation necessary!
… The annoying SMS messages from nocturnal friends is not the only thing which bothers me about this service, but also the fact, that the texting a message(reply) to twttr ends up on their website. Best thing is to allow users to create micro groups, and give users the options of picking topics and setting rules to maintain privacy and control over the service. If Glass can do that, well, it be pretty awesome.
Michael Arrington wrote on TechCrunch:
Odeo released a new service today called Twttr, which is a sort of “group send” SMS application. Each person controls their own network of friends. When any of them send a text message to “40404,” all of his or her friends see the message via sms. This launched officially today, and a few select insiders were playing with the service at the Valleyschwag party in San Francisco last night…
If this was a new startup, a one or two person shop, I’d give it a thumbs up for innovation and good execution on a simple but viral idea.
But the fact that this is coming from Odeo makes me wonder – what is this company doing to make their core offering compelling? How do their shareholders feel about side projects like Twttr when their primary product line is, besides the excellent design, a total snoozer?
The first tweet was actually sent on March 21, 2006. Nick Bilton in Hatching Twitter:
It was mid-July 2006, and the Valley had the feel of an amusement park that had just reopened for business. Exciting new social rides were being built on the, plots that had once belonged to pet-food Web sites and other pedestrian ideas from the late nineties. And now admission was free. You simply paid in privacy by giving up your personal information for access.
The new Valley had a new name too. Web 2.0! New and improved: the social Web.