Odeo originally owned Twitter when the service launched in 2006.
Odeo was a podcast company founded by Evan Williams and Noah Glass. When Apple announced podcast support for iTunes, Odeo’s original business faced a major strategic challenge, so its team explored new ideas, including a short-message service developed around Jack Dorsey’s concept.
The Twitter project began as an internal experiment among Odeo employees. It was first known as “twttr” and was tested by a small group before becoming a separate company. Twitter, Inc. was incorporated in 2007 as the service grew beyond Odeo.
People sometimes identify Twitter as a project of Blogger because Evan Williams had previously co-founded Blogger. Blogger was important to Williams’s career, but Odeo—not Blogger—was the company that incubated Twitter. Odeo’s role explains why Twitter’s earliest history is closely linked to podcasting and Silicon Valley startup restructuring.