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into the cell phone domain in 1985 as part of the Global System for Mobile Sys-
tems Communications (GSM) standards. The limit was 160 characters. The first
GSM/SMS message was sent on December 3, 1992. Soon, other networks adopted
the same idea. After slow growth, text messaging became a huge subindustry with
trillions of messages and billions of dollars in revenue.
Jack Derby was in a working discussion about GSM at a company called Odeo
while an undergraduate at New York University. He proposed using SMS codes
for communication. This idea had a working name of “Twittr” derived from the
existing name “Flickr,” both of which used five-character codes. The term “Twit-
tr” was later expanded to “Twitter,” which had an older and common meaning of
short bird calls. This also led to calling individual messages “tweets” and to using
a songbird as the Twitter logo.
At first, Twitter was used for internal communications within Odeo. In October
2006, a group of employees bought out Odeo and formed another company called
Obvious Corporation. Among the assets acquired from Odeo was Twitter.com.
Among the founders were Biz Stone, Jack Derby, Evan Williams, and others.
Twitter began to gain popularity as the result of a display at a conference in
2007. Two large plasma displays showed Twitter messages from various confer-
ence speakers communicating with each other.
After that successful conference, the rapid growth of Twitter and the phe-
nomenon of millions of followers waiting for short messages from famous people
deserve to be studied both at business schools and at medical schools that train
clinical psychologists.
From a distance, it is hard to see why millions of short messages have such
a strong appeal that some people spend hours per day reading and writing them.
Twitter may have accidentally tapped into a fundamental factor of the human brain
that demonstrates that most people prefer to absorb short messages of only a few
words rather than full paragraphs or pages of text.
From looking at messages posted on another social network, LinkedIn, there
may be some merit to limiting messages to 140 characters. Many LinkedIn posts
are long, dreary paragraphs of unsupported opinions with nothing very useful in
them. They often run on for hundreds of words. The larger LinkedIn post limit of
4,000 characters definitely leads to an excess of lengthy messages.
Twitter remains a private company with Jack Dorsey as Chairman. Revenues
are not reported but are apparently large enough for the company to have more
than 400 employees and to be in continuous growth mode. Twitter received two
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