Twitter was launched as Twttr beta on @Ev’s birthday

@dom wrote the whole story behind the formation and launch of twitter, and it was an inspiring and interesting one.
Twitter was not named “Twitter” during its first launch. It was Twttr in the initial beta launch, and that was on the present CEO Evan Williams‘ birthday. A good gift for him and to the millions of users who are using it right now. I have been on Twitter as @sizzler_chetan for more than an year but never found a story on formation of twitter.

It was named Twttr as it has 5 characters and American SMS shortcodes are five characters, and they prototyped a 5-character number as their short-code.
Here is the drastic change once happened in the Twitter building team, which still led to a better path -

Meanwhile, Odeo and the corporate board were at a tension point. Not only was the value of Twttr difficult to describe, the relevance of Odeo was declining monthly. Drastic cuts were recommended. One day in early May 2006, @Ev let four of us go: @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, me, and @Rabble. @Noah and @TimRoberts would later be asked to leave as well. It was a tough decision and huge shock to each of us. We all handled it differently. Looking back on it, I think Twitter allowed us to stay connected when we might not have otherwise been. After all, we weren’t even public with the site yet, so each of us continued to add value just by using it with each other.

Twttr, directly. During this transition, Twttr.com launched to the public. Still, very few people understood its value. At the time most people were paying per SMS message, and so wouldn’t Twttr run up our bills? Also, how were we supposed to use this thing and who cares what I’m doing? Each one of us original users became a kind of personal evangelist for Twttr, trying to get our coworkers and friends to use it. At this point, Obvious Corp was born as an incubator with Twttr as its sole project.

@Jack was still just an engineer, and the service was only a few months old when the group acquired Twitter.com and re-branded.

Messages were to be limited to 140, and was over 160 at that time, which caused problems with the SMS characters limit.
This statement by @jack inspired many, and includes @dom who was not working at that moment. -

One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters.

And since then, Twitter has been on the rise and its on a big situation at present. A good story.