The first big influx of people signed up to Twitter in March 2007, after it became a breakout app at the annual SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. But even web geeks didn't quite know what to make of Twitter. Was it an “IM/blogging hybrid," as I described it in June 2007, a month or so after I'd joined. Was it a "microblogging" app, like Tumblr, another trendy internet site to launch that year? Or was it "a weird experiment normally found in neuroscience labs," as a colleague of mine said?
