Twitter Was Almost Named Jitter
Before it was "Twitter" or even "twttr," America's favorite microblogging service had two other, absolutely terrible names. Crackhead names.
"Jitter" and "Twitch" were what engineers called Twitter in the very early days, describing what happened to your phone when it got one of the SMS text messages then used to circulate all tweets.
"Neither one of them really inspired the best sort of imagery," Twitter creator Jack Dorsey told WNYC, so he and fellow staffers busted out the Oxford English Dictionary and started scanning downward from "Twitch." Boom, Twitter. Thank God they didn't go with a name evoking short attention spanned meth addicts; could you imagine what that would do to Twitter's reputation as a hub for sober intellectual discourse?
