About us

Twitter is a privately funded startup with offices in the SoMA neighborhood of San Francisco, CA. Started as a side project in March of 2006, Twitter has grown into a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices.

In countries all around the world, people follow the sources most relevant to them and access information via Twitter as it happens—from breaking world news to updates from friends. See what people are doing right now.

Twitter Employees

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Jack Dorsey had grown interested in the simple idea of being able to know what his friends were doing. Specifically, Jack wondered if there might be an opportunity to build something compelling around this simple status concept. When he brought the idea up to his colleagues, it was decided that a prototype should be built.

Twitter was funded initially by Obvious, a creative environment in San Francisco, CA. The first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Obvious. In May 2007, Twitter Incorporated was founded.

Why do so many people seem to like Twitter?

Simplicity has played an important role in Twitter's success. People are eager to connect with other people and Twitter makes that simple. Twitter asks one question, "What's happening?" Answers must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or the web.

Twitter's core technology is a device agnostic message routing system with rudimentary social networking features. By accepting messages from sms, web, mobile web, instant message, or from third party API projects, Twitter makes it easy for folks to stay connected.

Isn't Twitter just too much information?

No, in fact, Twitter solves information overload by changing expectations traditionally associated with online communication. At Twitter, we ask one question, "What's happening?" The answers to this question are for the most part rhetorical. In other words, users do not expect a response when they send a message to Twitter. On the receiving end, Twitter is ambient--updates from your friends and relatives float to your phone, IM, or web site and you are only expected to pay as much or as little attention to them as you see fit.

The result of using Twitter to stay connected with friends, relatives, and coworkers is that you have a sense of what folks are up to but you are not expected to respond to any updates unless you want to. This means you can step in and out of the flow of information as it suits you and it never queues up with increasing demand of your attention. Additionally, users are very much in control of whose updates they receive, when they receive them, and on what device. For example, we provide settings for scheduling Twitter to automatically turn off at dinnertime and users can switch off Twitter updates at any point.

Simply put, Twitter is what you make of it--receive a lot of information about your friends, or just a tiny bit. It's up to them.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on macintosh computers except for testing purposes. Our web site and user interface were designed using Omnigraffle and Photoshop.

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

How do you make money from Twitter?

Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don't want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world. While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.

What's next for Twitter?

We continue to follow user behavior and pay close attention to feature requests. We launched our mobile site, m.twitter.com after getting lots of requests for this feature. However, we are also very much guided by our philosophy of keeping things simple and intuitive so we like to restrain ourselves with regard to features. That being said, people seem to be calling for more interesting ways to share feedback with one another and organize themselves and their updates into groups--we're paying attention to these requests.

We plan to build Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.

Contact us

For ongoing information about Twitter, please read our company blog. Also, feel free to contact us with service questions, partnership proposals, or media inquiries.

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