Twitter’s original working name was “twttr.”
The service emerged from a brainstorming project at Odeo, a podcasting company, in 2006. Jack Dorsey proposed a short-message system that could send updates to a group through mobile phones. The early internal project used the name “twttr,” styled without vowels, before the company adopted the familiar Twitter name.
The first message was posted by Dorsey on March 21, 2006, and the service was publicly launched later that year. Twitter’s early 140-character limit reflected the constraints of SMS text messaging, which helped shape its brief, rapid style of communication.
The name is often confused with Odeo, the company from which the project emerged. Odeo was not Twitter’s original name; it was the parent company’s podcasting business. Twitter later became an independent company and expanded far beyond its initial SMS-oriented concept.