witter, an online message service that limits posts to 140 characters, began in 2006, created by Obvious Corp., run by Evan Williams and Biz Stone. It received little mainstream attention until 2007. The Wall Street Journal wrote about the service in March of that year, and in April, Fred Stutzman, now a University of North Carolina doctoral student in Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science, wrote a post called “The 12-Minute Definitive Guide to Twitter" on the AOL Developer Network, calling it an online open chat room. The service began to get more mainstream attention after the Los Angeles Fire Department made use of the message network in October 2007 during the California wildfires crisis.
The service continued to grow throughout 2008, playing a role as information source in the U.S. election. In July 2008, the company bought an add-on application, Summize, a tool that allowed advanced searching of tweets. (CNET)
By winter and spring of 2009, Twitter began to get frequent mention in the mainstream media. Almost all major U.S. newspapers claimed their spot on the service. (Muckrack)
Add-on software bloomed, to shorten links or to manage and filter large groups of users and content. News managers and employees shared their ideas on how to use the system as well, mainly to broadcast news links, as the industry searched for business solutions and higher readership