At One Place

Which came first, Twitter or YouTube?

Which came first, Twitter or YouTube?
YouTube
2005 — one year before Twitter

YouTube came first, by one year. The domain was registered; the first video followed in April.

Side by side

Twitter YouTube
Year 2006 2005
Date 2006-03-21 2005-02-14
Category technology technology
What happened Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet. The domain was registered; the first video followed in April.

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.

YouTube

The youtube.com domain was registered on Valentine's Day 2005, the first video — "Me at the zoo", 19 seconds of a co-founder at San Diego Zoo — was uploaded on 23 April, and the site opened publicly in the winter. Google bought it in November 2006 for $1.65 billion, about twenty months after the domain was registered. It is younger than Facebook by a year and older than Twitter by one.

Common questions

Which came first, Twitter or YouTube?
YouTube, by one year — 2005 against 2006.
When did Twitter start?
2006. Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet.
When did YouTube start?
2005. The domain was registered; the first video followed in April.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked