Craig Hockenberry writing at Furbo.org (Back in 2013):
I started started using Twitter at the beginning of December. Like John Gruber and my colleagues at the Iconfactory, I loved our new “water cooler for the Internet.” I was, however, unhappy with using Twitter via the website or Dashboard widgets.
While taking a shower in the middle of December, an idea struck me: it wouldn’t be hard to hook up Twitter’s new API to the Cocoa networking classes and display a table with tweets. So I dried off and started prototyping: the next day I had the world’s first Twitter client running on my Mac.
A few days later, I checked all my code into our repository and Twitterrific was born:
r174 | craig | 2006-12-20 17:54:11 -0800 (Wed, 20 Dec 2006) | 1 line`Initial import
It’s a great story about the beginning of Twitter, and how Twitterrific came about. It certainly seems that everyone involved at the early stages, were super influential on the end product that all of us use today.
Twitter launched on the 15th July 2006, and the initial release of Twitterrific was on the 15h January 2007. So it didn’t take long!
I joined Twitter in July 2009, so even though I feel like I was relatively early to the service, I can’t imagine how cool it would of been to use it in it’s earlier days. I would imagine, something similar to App.net, as that was very enjoyable to use. But sadly didn’t make it.
In related news, Iconfactory have been working on Twitterrific 5 for Mac for a while, becuase of a hufgely successful Kickstarter campaign. And it will go live on the Mac App Store on the 10th October!