---
title: "Which came first, Harry Potter or Twitter?"
description: "Harry Potter vs Twitter: Harry Potter came first, by 9 years — 1997 against 2006. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/harry-potter-vs-twitter/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Harry Potter or Twitter?

**Which came first, Harry Potter or Twitter?: Harry Potter**

1997 — 9 years before Twitter

Harry Potter came first, by 9 years. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in the UK.

## Side by side

|  | Harry Potter | Twitter |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1997 | 2006 |
| Date | 1997-06-26 | 2006-03-21 |
| Category | media | technology |
| What happened | Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in the UK. | Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet. |

## Harry Potter

Bloomsbury published the first book in June 1997 with a print run of 500 copies, most of which went to libraries, after twelve other publishers had rejected the manuscript. The company's chairman gave the first chapter to his eight-year-old daughter, who demanded the rest. It came out the same year as Netflix was founded and a year before Google.

## Twitter

The first tweet — "just setting up my twttr" — went out on 21 March 2006, and the service opened publicly that July. The 140-character limit came from SMS: a text message allows 160 characters and 20 were reserved for the username. When the limit doubled to 280 in 2017 the SMS constraint had been irrelevant for years.

## Common questions

### Which came first, Harry Potter or Twitter?

Harry Potter, by 9 years — 1997 against 2006.

### When did Harry Potter start?

1997. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in the UK.

### When did Twitter start?

2006. Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet.

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## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]