Twitter has changed the world during its eight short years of existence. It started out as a small micro-blogging experiment, designed for smartphones using SMS and grew into a full-blown website and mobile app. Now it is used not only by journalists and celebrities, but also by average people and protesters.
Jack Dorsey came up with the idea of an SMS-based micro-blogging platform called twttr in February 2006. He presented his idea to podcasting company Odeo's co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, who later gave him the green light to pursue his idea. Working with software developer Noah Glass, Dorsey built the platform and the official name "Twitter" was born.
"just setting up my twttr," became the first tweet ever on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey posted it at 9:50 p.m. Twitter launched publicly on July 15, 2006. At that time, it still belonged to Odeo. Then, Odeo quickly died out as Apple's iTunes took over the podcasting market. However, Twitter was just starting to gain traction, so Dorsey, Williams and Stone worked together to buy back the company and gain the rights to Twitter.
In 2007, Twitter became a company in its own right and slowly began to amass users. Twitter finally took off during South by Southwest in March 2007. By the end of the week, the number of people using Twitter daily had tripled. The number of tweets posted each day rose from 20,000 to 60,000 during that week. By 2008, the number of tweets posted each quarter increased exponentially from 400,000 to 100 million and the rest, as they say, is history
Once Twitter went viral, celebrities, news organizations, companies and millions of ordinary people around the world joined in to see what all the fuss was about. In June 2008, Twitter created a verification system, so that celebrities could have official accounts and impostors would have a harder time posing as high-profile people. In April of 2010, Twitter set off on its app creation quest. By 2013, Twitter decided it was ready to go public and held its IPO on Nov. 7 of that year, with a valuation of $31 billion. As of February 2014, Twitter had more than 241 million active users every month and that number is growing every day.
It all happened so fast - it's been quite a whirlwind for Twitter.
Along the way, the micro-blogging website has gone through many changes, as the company added new elements and users discovered new ways to use the service. Most of the things we now consider integral to Twitter were actually invented by the users themselves and officially adopted by Twitter. The infamous @mention was created by early Twitter users as a way to hold a conversation and capture another user's attention. The use of hashtags to categorize posts was also a user invention, as was the retweet function, which users wanted, so that they could share the tweets they liked best from other users. Initially, users would write "RT" before a retweeted post to give credit to the original user.
One of the only things that has truly remained constant about Twitter, whether users like it or not, is the 140 character limit. Since Twitter was first imagined as a mobile SMS-based platform, the character limit was necessary. At first, many scorned Twitter as a frivolous form of new media, characterized by abbreviations, acronyms and terrible spelling. Twitter was deemed "shallow" and "unsubstantial," as many long-form thinkers dismissed the power of 140 characters.
Now, eight years later, it is crystal clear that 140 characters can hold the power to depose dictators, up-end nations and free the wrongfully imprisoned. Twitter was responsible for freeing an American graduate student, who was arrested at an anti-government protest in Mahalla, Egypt, in April 2008. The phrase, "Twitter Revolution," was coined in 2009, when thousands of anti-government protesters in Iran took to Twitter to organize against then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Since then, protesters in Egypt, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela and more have used Twitter to organize protest movements against repressive regimes.
Even if some people still refuse to acknowledge the power of Twitter, many governments have clearly taken notice. China blocks Twitter, Egypt took Twitter down in 2011, Twitter in Syria has faced many attacks, India blocked many accounts in 2012 and even the U.K.'s Prime Minister, David Cameron, threatened to block Twitter during protests in 2011. Most recently, Venezuela blocked protesters' pictures of police violence on Twitter and Turkey cut off its citizens' access to their accounts, as well.
Twitter has quite literally changed the world. It has altered the course of nations, changed the way we report news and revolutionized our method of communication. Not bad for eight years of work!
