Facebook and MySpace spent billions trying to make your digital life a complex portfolio. They wanted you building profiles, uploading high-res photos, embedding multimedia, and integrating bizarre third-party widgets into your homepage. It was a lot of noise. Simplicity won that round. That is exactly why Twitter took off.
If you have been living under a rock, the basic premise is straightforward. You post a message. It goes to your followers. Done. No dozen emails. No text chains. Just one broadcast. People used it to organize protests. They used it for impromptu meetups. They used it to tell you what they had for lunch.
The history of this platform is messy. It started with Evan Williams. He had already built Blogger, which Google bought. So Williams went to work for the search giant. But he didn’t stay long. He left with an employee named Biz Stone to start a new venture.
That company was called Odeo.
It was supposed to be a podcasting hub. Williams didn’t even care about podcasts. Under his leadership, Odeo lost its way. But one project was gaining traction. A messaging service. Stone named it Twitter. He liked the idea of short bursts of information. He compared it to birds chirping. He even noted that many ring tones sound like bird calls.
Odeo struggled. Twitter thrived. Williams bought out the investors. He merged the failing podcast company with the rising star into a new entity called Obvious Corporation. Jack Dorsey joined the team. He focused on interfaces. He made sure people could Tweet via instant messaging and email.
In March 2006, things split again. Twitter left Obvious. It became Twitter Incorporated.
This article focuses on the technical engine behind the chaos: Twitter’s application programming interface (API). We will break down what a Tweet actually is. We will look at how you create them. We will look at how you read them. We will also examine how Twitter optimized its service for mobile platforms long before everyone else caught on.
What Makes a Tweet Unique?
In the next section, we will define the Tweet. Not the cultural phenomenon. The technical unit.
