Twitter officially turned 3 today according to its CEO and founder Jack Dorsey (@jack) who Tweeted the following message earlier:

Jack Dorsey's Tweet today

Twitter (Twittr) was founded by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. It began in March 2006 as a research and development project inside San Francisco podcasting company Odeo.

In October 2006, the company was bought out by management, and Williams, Stone, and other Odeo employees started another company named Obvious Corp. to operate Odeo and Twittr which back then was just a startup that Williams had been testing in the offices for about a year.

Twitter had been initially used internally by Odeo’s employees and became a product of Obvious at this time.

The service rapidly gained popularity: In March 2007, it won the 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category. Dorsey, the man behind the concept of Twitter, gave the following playful acceptance speech at SXSW: “We’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!” [see video below]

Absolute legend! Happy birthday Twitter…