Twitter Turns Thwee!

With the speed that technology swoops in, takes ground, and starts to proliferate, many often are very familiar with the in-s and out-s of the latest and greatest, tout the technology to no end, but for the life of them, have no idea where it came from.

This is true for me. And since I am a "technology anthropologist" by interest, I put together a little timeline of Twitter's first three years. This information is compiled from the article Twitter Trounces the Terrible Twos, Turns Three written by MG Siegler.

I must say, this is not bad for a three year old!

2006 - Twitter was launched in 2006 as a side project of Odeo founder’s Noah Glass and Evan Williams (now Twitter’s chief executive).

It was first known as Twttr.

Williams created Obvious Corp. to work on projects such as Twitter and sold Odeo in 2007, putting the focus solely on Twitter.

2007 -
In March of 2007, Twitter first really put itself on the map by taking the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas by storm. It won an award in the blogging category and it set up monitors throughout the convention center to show what other people were tweeting.

2008 -
This was Twitter's important year. It started out God-awful — crashing left and right.

But Twitter remained popular as it once again dominated SXSW in 2008. Then, the press coverage shifted to focusing on Twitter’s downtime and the “Fail Whale” entered the geek lexicon.

Then, in June, it brought in outside help from Pivotal Labs, a group of for-hire developers. From there, things started to improve.

In July 2008, it bought the Twitter search engine, Summize, renamed Twitter Search. This allowed Twitter to be a powerful search of real time information.

Later in 2008, celebrities and traditional news media started using Twitter en masse. And events like the Presidential election and the Mumbai terrorist attacks brought it to new heights.

2009 -
On the afternoon of January 15th, when the US Airways plane went down on the Hudson, this twitpic, tweeted byJanis Krums, or as he calls himself "miracle on the Hudson photo guy," demonstrated the sheer viral spread of information through Twitter.