---
title: "Which came first, Netflix or Twitter?"
description: "Netflix vs Twitter: Netflix 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/netflix-vs-twitter/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Netflix or Twitter?

**Which came first, Netflix or Twitter?: Netflix**

1997 — 9 years before Twitter

Netflix came first, by 9 years. Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded a DVD rental-by-post company.

## Side by side

|  | Netflix | Twitter |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1997 | 2006 |
| Date | 1997-08-29 | 2006-03-21 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded a DVD rental-by-post company. | Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet. |

## Netflix

Netflix was founded in August 1997, a year before Google, and posted DVDs for a decade before streaming launched in January 2007. The famous origin story — Hastings founding it after a $40 late fee on Apollo 13 — has been called a useful myth by co-founder Marc Randolph. Blockbuster declined to buy the company for $50 million in 2000.

## 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, Netflix or Twitter?

Netflix, by 9 years — 1997 against 2006.

### When did Netflix start?

1997. Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded a DVD rental-by-post company.

### 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]