What was Twitter's original name?

Twitter's original name was twttr. The name was used for the early project created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, before the service became widely known as Twitter.

The spelling was deliberately shortened: the team drew inspiration from services such as Flickr and from the five-character short codes used for SMS messaging. The domain Twitter.com was initially unavailable, which also influenced the temporary name. Dorsey published the first message, “just setting up my twttr,” in March 2006.

The service was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. After the team acquired the Twitter.com domain, the name was changed to Twitter roughly six months later. A common mix-up is treating “Twitter” as the original project name; it was the later, permanent name. The platform was rebranded as X in 2023, but twttr remains the canonical answer to this historical question.