How Jack Dorsey came up with the idea for Twitter

The idea of the messaging of the "status" from one person to others - that being, what's the current situation, where have you been, and what are you doing - came from the finger-drumming of programmer Jack Dorsey. The Missouri-born Dorsey took interest in taxi-dispatch routing through the age of fourteen and went on to develop open-source software that is still in use at East Coast taxicab companies. Dorsey relocated to Oakland, California, in 2000 with aspirations of starting a business that would dispatch taxis, package couriers, and even emergency services from the Web-based hub.

This concept attracted him towards the LiveJournal.com site, where he further toyed with a concept of providing Web-based access to "status information".

Determining his vision could only be achieved if he blended traditional Web presence with the immediacy of instant messaging, he began conceiving a simple interface design through which, by his own definition, he could enable a truly "live" LiveJournal - real-time journal entries from wherever and whenever. Having joined Odeo, a Web 2.0 company whose site provides users with RSS- syndicated audio and video, he continued to operate on his idea, slipping small bits of the potential solution into his projects there.

Over the course of several years, he found believe the idea was finally ready for prime time, and he pitched it to the receptive ears of then-creative director Isaac "Biz" Stone and investor Evan Williams. In March 2006, Dorsey sketched the interface, and within two short weeks, he'd developed the initial functional design of Twitter, then named stat.us.

Since naming and branding are paramount when carving out and retaining public mindshare, Dorsey, Stone, and Williams knew their breakthrough status-messaging tool needed to have a high level of mental stickiness. Technical jargon sometimes fits the bill but typically only attracts a crowd of like-minded tech junkies - particularly if there's some technical in-joke embedded somewhere in the name.

Wisely, these three entrepreneurs knew their target audience was much larger - all-encompassing, really - and the name had to have appeal, meaning, and retention for practically everyone in every field of great interest. In a February 2009 Los Angeles Times interview, Jack Dorsey described it this way:

So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word "twitch," . . . but [it wasn't] a great product name because it doesn't bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and that we came across the word "twitter," also it was just perfect. The meaning was "a short burst of inconsequential information," and "chirps from birds." And that's exactly what the product was.

Of course, the original name reveals the natural tech instincts of Dorsey, who initially noted it as "twttr" - the five-character name being aligned using the American SMS short code naming convention while also borrowing a bit of the contraction style found in the name of the popular photo-sharing site Flickr. Ultimately, however, the name was expanded to Twitter.

The service launched publicly in July 2006, and Twitter became a full-fledged company by May 2007. Today, Twitter is headquartered in the business district of San Francisco, nestled amid a working population that darts about to achieve the day's to-do list while always finding time for you to briefly connect and chat along the way, very much in the spirit of (and maybe as a perpetual inspiration to) the Twitter philosophy.

And, to the original question posed at the outset of this discussion - who is Jack Dorsey, and so why do you care? Well, here's your answer: Jack Dorsey is essential to you not while he created Twitter for your use. Rather, he's important to you while he created Twitter to fill a genuine business need, via immediate and intelligent communication, to resolve a problem and enhance a customer experience. The importance of his motivation to produce Twitter, real-time yet simple, is the same approach you should adopt to make probably the most of your business growth and customer experience through the tool's use.

Your task, going forward, is to apply the Jack Dorsey model of sensibility to your revised and improved outreach efforts today. As Jack did, identify any communication barriers that are hampering an element of your business or one of your personal goals and determine how the use of immediate, concise, and focused messaging might smooth the interaction you've with your customers, supplying them useful - and possibly entertaining - information at up-to-the- minute availability. So, the new question is, When you begin to add Twitter into your business strategy, are you going to have any Jack in you?

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How Jack Dorsey came up with the idea for Twitter

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