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Which came first, Twitter or the World Wide Web?

Which came first, Twitter or the World Wide Web?
the World Wide Web
1989 — 17 years before Twitter

the World Wide Web came first, by 17 years. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal at CERN.

Side by side

Twitter the World Wide Web
Year 2006 1989
Date 2006-03-21
Category technology technology
What happened Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal at CERN.

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.

the World Wide Web

Berners-Lee circulated his proposal in March 1989, built the first browser and server by the end of 1990, and CERN put the software into the public domain in 1993. The Web is twenty years younger than the internet: the internet is the network, the Web is one service running on it, and email and file transfer both predate the Web by decades. The first website went live in December 1990 and is still online.

Common questions

Which came first, Twitter or the World Wide Web?
the World Wide Web, by 17 years — 1989 against 2006.
When did Twitter start?
2006. Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet.
When did the World Wide Web start?
1989. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal at CERN.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked