Twitter was originally called Twttr when it began as an internal project at Odeo.
In 2006, Odeo employees explored new ideas after Apple’s iTunes podcasting strategy threatened the company’s original business. Jack Dorsey proposed a short-message service, and the team developed it as an experiment. The first prototype used the name Twttr, without the vowels.
Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet on 21 March 2006, and the service was publicly launched later that year. The company initially operated as Obvious Corporation before becoming Twitter. Its short-message format eventually grew far beyond the podcasting context in which it started.
Twttr is sometimes confused with TweetDeck, which is a separate Twitter client acquired in 2011. The name also predates the familiar bird branding and the later 280-character limit.