Twitter Vs Facebook History – Moving into the Cloud?

Twitter Vs Facebook

HISTORY FACEBOOK

The advent of Facebook came about as a spin-off of a Harvard University version of Hot or Not called Facemash.[11] Mark Zuckerberg, while attending Harvard as a sophomore, concocted Facemash on October 28, 2003. Zuckerberg was blogging about a girl and trying to think of something to do to get her off his mind.[12] According to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash “used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the ‘hotter’ person.” To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard’s computer network and copied the house’s private dormitory ID images. “Perhaps Harvard will squelch it for legal reasons without realizing its value as a venture that could possibly be expanded to other schools (maybe even ones with good-looking people … ),” Zuckerberg wrote in his personal blog. “But one thing is certain, and it’s that I’m a jerk for making this site. Oh well. Someone had to do it eventually … “[13] The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy and faced expulsion, but ultimately the charges were dropped.[14]

The following semester, Zuckerberg founded “The Facebook”, originally located at thefacebook.com, on February 4, 2004.[15] “Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard,” Zuckerberg told The Harvard Crimson. “I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.”[16] Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on the service.[17] Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to help promote the website. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale.[18] This expansion continued when it opened to all Ivy League and Boston area schools, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.[19] Facebook incorporated in the summer of 2004 and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company’s president.[20] In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California.[18] The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.[21]

Facebook launched a high school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.[22] At that time, high school networks required an invitation to join.[23] Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft.[24] Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006 to everyone of ages 13 and older with a valid e-mail address.[25][26] In October 2008, Facebook announced that it was to set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.[27]

HISTORY TWITTER

A circa 2000 blueprint sketch by Jack Dorsey, envisioning a SMS-based social network.

The birth of Twitter materialized out of a “daylong brainstorming session” where board members of the podcasting company Odeo, in an attempt to break out of a creative slump, broke up into teams to come up with ideas. During this session, Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of a service that used SMS to tell small groups what an individual was doing, partly inspired by TXTMob[8], an sms group messaging project which is now defunct.

The working name was just “Status” for a while. It actually didn’t have a name. We were trying to name it, and mobile was a big aspect of the product early on … We liked the SMS aspect, and how you could update from anywhere and receive from anywhere.

We wanted to capture that in the name — we wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word “twitch,” because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But “twitch” is not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word “twitter,” and it was just perfect. The definition was “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds.” And that’s exactly what the product was.
—Jack Dorsey[9]

The original product name/codename for the service was named twttr; inspired by Flickr and the fact that American SMS short codes are five characters. The developers prototyped with “10958″ as short code, later changing it to “40404″ for “ease of use and memorability.”[8] Work on the project started on March 21, 2006 when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 12:50 PM PST: “just setting up my twttr”.[10]

The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees, later launching publicly into a full-scale version in July 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corp and acquired Odeo and all of its assets – including Odeo.com and Twitter.com – from the investors and other shareholders.[11] Twitter later spun off into its own company in April 2007.[12]

The tipping point for Twitter’s popularity came at the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas. During the event, usage tripled from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000.[13] According to Laughing Squid blogger Scott Beale, Twitter “absolutely rul[ed]” SXSW. Social software researcher Danah Boyd said Twitter “own[ed]” the festival.[14] “The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages,” according to Newsweek’s Steven Levy. “Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it. Soon everyone was buzzing and posting about this new thing that was sort of instant messaging and sort of blogging and maybe even a bit of sending a stream of telegrams.”[15] Also at the festival, Twitter won the SXSW Web Award. The team said, “We’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!”[16]

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