In Oakland in 2000, Dorsey started his company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web. His other projects and ideas at this time included networks of medical devices and a "frictionless service market". In July 2000, building on dispatching and inspired in part by LiveJournal and possibly by AOL Instant Messenger, he had the idea for a Web-based realtime status/short message communication service. When he first saw implementations of instant messaging, Dorsey had wondered if the software's user status output could be shared among friends easily.He approached Odeo, who at the time happened to be interested in text messaging. Dorsey and Biz Stone decided that SMS text suited the status message idea, and built a prototype of Twitter in about two weeks.The idea attracted many users at Odeo and investment from Evan Williams who had left Google after selling them Pyra Labs and Blogger.
Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets". It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 300 million users as of 2011, generating over 300 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It has been described as "the SMS of the Internet." Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco, with additional servers and offices in New York City.
