How Twitter was named and bought Twitter.com for $7,500
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
Biz Stone discusses the naming of his company.
Today at DOMAINfest in Santa Monica, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone talked about how they named the company and bought the domain for $7,500.
Stone and his co-founders wanted a name that showed “urgency”. They came up with Jitter, but thought that sounded negative.
One of his partners was paging through a dictionary and found Twitter. Since Stone’s wife worked with animals, he immediately liked the name and knew its connotation.
Since Twitter.com was taken, the company started with Twttr.com.
When Twitter started to take off they contacted the owner of Twitter.com, who was a bird enthusiast.
“We offered him $7500 or something and he was like ‘holy crap, payday!’”
Stone said, in his defense for offering what now seems like a small amount, they had no idea how big it was going to get. At the time he said $7,500 was a lot of money for them.
Nice sale for the bird enthusiast.
recycling ? http://domainnamewire.com/2010/09/14/twitter-bought-twitter-com-for-7500-in-2006/
Adam, this is an eco-friendly blog
They’re lucky Rick Schwartz wasn’t a bird enthusiast.
LOL
As for the seller, good money sure but domain industry titans would have foreseen the possibility and had shares in twitter as well as getting $300k ($10k down) for it and ending up with possibly a billion in the end!
Thank God it wasn’t in a greedy domainer’s hands.