A report by the New York Times reveals that the world’s largest micro-blogging social network, Twitter, might have had a different name. One of the names’ co-founder, Evan Williams, suggested that the social network could have the name like Friendstalker, since a lot of people would stalk others on Twitter.
“Hey, are you on Friendstalker?”, “What’s your Friendstalker handle?”, this is what would have happened if Twitter was named Friendstalker initially. The Silicon Valley based startup had an idea, and was hunting for some catchy names to give itself a brand.
Besides Friendstalker, a lot of other co-founders also suggested some more names like Vibrate and Twitch. But after sometime, they were looking at the dictionary, to come up with names that would start with Tw, and they ended up finding the definition of Twitter, which is “The light chirping sound made by certain birds.”
And that was not when the team decided upon the name, here’s what happened after that:
A few weeks later, after several other meetings and presentations of spinoff ideas concluded, Williams made a definitive decision to move forward with Glass and Dorsey’s status concept. “In terms of our new projects, I feel most strongly about Twitter,” Williams wrote in an e-mail to Glass and a couple of other Odeo executives. “We could have a lot more discussion, and I may change my mind, but I think I just need to make a call at this point, and my gut is pulling me to Twitter.” Dorsey, still one of the junior employees at Odeo, was not included in the discussions or e-mail, but he soon became an important engineer on the new Twitter team. And in March 2006, Dorsey sent the first tweet, quickly followed by Stone and Glass. (Eventually, Dorsey decided to limit tweets to 160 characters, or the maximum length of a text message on a mobile phone. It would later be lowered to 140 characters.)