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5 Years Later, Jack Dorsey Tweets About Twitter's Beginning

MG Siegler

Did you know it was exactly five years ago today that Jack Dorsey and a few other team members working at Odeo first started to work on what would become Twitter? How do I know? Dorsey is tweeting about it right now.

While programming began five years ago, it wasn’t until eight days later, on March 21, 2006, that Dorsey sent the famous first (non-automated) tweet: “inviting coworkers”.

Dorsey also notes that it was exactly five years ago that they got the official go ahead on the Twitter idea, then called “twttr“. He has also shared (via his Tumblr) the conversation he had with Biz Stone about the project on that day. The first mention:

me: Biz! How goes?  We’re starting work on the twttr implementation today.

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Biz: really?! NICE

Dorsey also reveals that the reason they initially droped the vowels out of “Twitter” was to try and get the SMS shortcode. …But Teen People already owned it.

Dorsey promises to share more of his original drawings, emails, and notes about the early days of Twitter. Naturally, he’s going to share them on Twitter.

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MG Siegler

M.G. Siegler is a general partner at Google Ventures, where he primarily focuses on early-stage investments. He has been deeply involved in the startup space since 2005, first as a web developer, then as a writer, and most recently as an investor and advisor. Having spent the past year in London helping to get Google Ventures’ European organization up and running, M.G. is now back in the Bay Area, working mainly out of Google Ventures’ San Francisco office. Before joining Google Ventures, M.G. was a founding partner of CrunchFund, an early-stage investment fund. Prior to that, he reported on the startup world as a writer for both TechCrunch and VentureBeat. M.G. still writes a column for TechCrunch on top of writing on his own sites and from time-to-time doing movie reviews in haiku. Originally from Ohio, M.G. graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor before moving out west to work in Hollywood. One day, he will write that killer screenplay.

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