The history of Twitter from the very beginning to the present day. Learn how the Twitter brand was created and developed and what it is known for today.
Twitter is a social network and service for short tweet messages, up to 140 characters long. In fact, this is a microblogging service with which you can chat with friends or read posts by other, usually well-known users.
The main thing that distinguishes Twitter from other social networks is the public availability of messages, which makes it more like a blog than a social network. The main office of the company is in San Francisco, but there are additional offices in San Antonio and Boston.
History of Twitter
There are two versions of the Twitter brand story. First, it is also official - Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, who was one of the participants in the startup Odeo, launched by former Google employee Evan Williams.
According to the second version, Twitter was founded by Noah Glass who developed Odeo at his home. His technology was taken as the basis of Twitter. So, with its help, the user could call a mobile phone number or dictate a voice message, which was subsequently converted into an audio file (MP3) file and published on the Internet.
One of the first people to invest in Odeo was Evan Williams. He was very interested in new technology, as a result, the Odeo project moved from Noah Glass's house to Evan's apartment. After a while, the startup participants got their own office. New employees were brought in to work on the project, including Jack Dorsey. Evan himself became the CEO.
In 2005, the world-famous Apple company radically changed Odeo's plans.
By the fall of 2005, the startup participants had completed work on a new podcast platform. However, they were late, as at the same time the release of the podcasting platform from Apple took place. Representatives of the IT giant said that the platform will be installed in hundreds of thousands of iPads, which were released at the same time. The Odeo team of 14 people was divided into two groups, the task was one - to give out something new.
In early 2006, Noah Glass and Jack Dorsey announced a new service. Its essence was that the system sends a message to one phone number, and the same message is duplicated in the system interface, it will be seen by all the user's friends. Thus, the service was originally developed for microblogging. The project was named Twttr. Noah Glass was appointed as the head of the company. On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet.
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The test version of the service worked inside Odeo and was used to communicate with company employees in a single place where everyone saw messages (tweets) of everyone. The project was originally called Twitter, but at the time of its release, the twitter.com domain was already taken, so the service was named Twttr. Six months later, the twitter.com domain was bought out, and the service was renamed into Twitter, which is familiar to everyone.
The public release of the platform took place in July 2006. By the end of the autumn of the same year, the number of service users numbered several thousand. Such a rapid growth in popularity was helped by a case - in August, an earthquake occurred in San Francisco. This news was actively discussed via Twitter. As a result, users quickly appreciated the convenience of the platform, since the same message did not need to be sent to friends. A message sent to one person was seen in the service interface by all the user's friends and, accordingly, everyone could connect to the discussion of the news in one place.
At the end of 2006, Williams convinced investors that Odeo would not last long and bought all their shares in this project from them. So he became the owner of Odeo, which then included Twitter.
In 2007, a series of changes awaited both startups - Odeo was renamed Obvious Corporation and co-founder Noah Glass left it. Twitter spun off from Odeo and became its own company. In the same year, the company's employees came up with and undertook an amazing marketing move. At one well-known conference, large screens were installed in two different halls. They broadcast messages from Twitter. So several hundred participants had the opportunity to communicate with each other online using tweets.
As a result, the service began to be even more actively discussed among the masses, and then this topic was picked up by bloggers. Trying to be the first to inform their multi-million audience about the new service, they literally advertised it for free. As a result, more than 60 thousand tweets were already sent per day, and before the conference this figure was a maximum of 20 thousand.
Growing popularity
The service gained worldwide popularity in 2008. Then the number of users reached 3 million, and at the end of 2009 it was already 9 million.
In 2010, the company released a Twitter client that was available for free to Mac, iPhone, and iPad users. In the same year, a new social network site with an updated interface was launched in test mode. Thanks to the changes, users have the opportunity to view pictures and videos.
At the end of 2011, the interface was updated again, with the "Connect" and "Find" buttons added to it.
In 2012, small businesses drew attention to the service, as they had the opportunity to publish ads in their accounts. Previously, only large companies could do this. In the same year, the company celebrated its 6th birthday, the number of users was 140 million. A new logo was released, which already lacked the text part. In the fall of the same year, the company acquired the Vine app. With it, users could record short 6-second videos. Vine was a separate application for Twitter. In the future, the company abandoned Vine and closed this project. Because of this, the project lost a significant part of the audience that produced video content - they all moved to Instagram.
Then the company developed rapidly and constantly expanded the possibilities of the social network for users:
- in 2013 the company earned more than $1.8 billion;
- in 2017, Twitter users were pleased with the new update - the size of messages increased from 140 to 280 characters;
- in 2018, the number of service users amounted to 321 million per month;
- in 2019, the Twttr platform was launched. It tests new functionality for Twitter, and if the test result is positive, then the new tool will be added to the main version of the service;
- As of the end of 2020, the company's revenue was $3.72 billion.
Some interesting facts about Twitter
- The peaks of user activity and audience growth fall on high-profile events in the world. So, on the day of Michael Jackson's death, the number of tweets exceeded 100 thousand per hour. Tweets of world famous personalities - Elon Musk, Donald Trump also provoke bursts of activity on the social network.
- In 2019, there was a huge failure in the service, which was observed in many countries of the world: the USA, Japan, Russia, countries of Western Europe and South America.
- More than 2 billion videos are viewed on Twitter every day around the world.
- The hash mark (#) was not invented by Twitter developers, but by a regular user who suggested using it at the beginning of the group name. I liked the idea and then went beyond this social network.
- In 2020, 1 million Twitter accounts were banned for "hate speech".
- Twitter does not ban for "nudity". It is there that users like to post both their own and other people's photos. Therefore, before allowing the child to register there, it is worth thinking several times.
Twitter is not only a great service for communication, here you can get a lot of useful and up-to-date information. Plus, here you can follow the tweets of people of interest to the user, while they do not have to be added to the contact list.
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