Twitter: 140 Characters

Jack Dorsey had an obsession with status updates. In 2005, he sat in the audio office and wondered what people did when they were not looking for information. They told each other what they were doing right now. Twitter launched with one question, what are you doing? The constraint was a feature. 140 characters forced clarity. You could not build an essay in that space. You had to boil your thought to pure form. Early users were developers and designers. By 2009, the platform had 1.3 million users and no revenue model. Then came viral mechanics. A celebrity would tweet. Their followers would retweet to their followers.