The tiddler concept, as used in TiddlyWeb and TiddlySpace comes from TiddlyWiki, which was created by Jeremy Ruston in 2004. TiddlyWiki was an early example of quite complex DOM manipulation and JavaScript in the browser. It caused quite a bit of buzz and became a successful open source project.

A few years later BT bought Osmosoft, ostensibly to better understand open source communities and techniques.

Jeremy has said that he created TiddlyWiki as a way to help him write: The tiddlers can operate as separate chunks that can be moved around, re-used, separately edited. Tiddlers started as documents and became many things, including plugins which could impact the behavior of their container, the TiddlyWiki file itself.