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Jack Dorsey: Twitter was built in two weeks

At a Twitter off-site meeting, Dorsey, who co-founded the company and went on to found Square, recalled the microblogging service's origins.

Daniel Terdiman Former Senior Writer / News
Daniel Terdiman is a senior writer at CNET News covering Twitter, Net culture, and everything in between.
Daniel Terdiman
Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in September. Daniel Terdiman/CNET

Rome may not have been built in a day, but Twitter was built in just two weeks.

During an onstage interview at a Twitter off-site meeting today, co-founder Jack Dorsey (who is also the founder of the mobile payments company, Square) recalled how long it took him to build the first version of the microblogging service: two weeks, according to a tweet from Guy Yalif, a member of Twitter's product marketing team who was present at the event.

As has become part of modern Internet legend, Dorsey built Twitter as a side project while he was an employee of Evan Williams' and Biz Stone's (now defunct) podcasting company Odeo. Together, the three men went on to turn Twitter into a stand-alone business.

Today, more than half a billion people have created Twitter accounts, and last month, current CEO Dick Costolo said that the service is now processing more than 500 million tweets a day.

Watch this: Inside Scoop: Twitter's inception was brief -- just like its messages