What is Twitter?
Twitter is a social media site that allows people to create a free profile online. This site is a service that will enable people to communicate with friends, family and co-workers with quick, easy messages. On Twitter, you can post tweets that can contain photos, videos, links or text. Some people have a private account which they use to keep in contact with their friends close to home and worldwide. Others keep their accounts public, meaning anyone can see and engage with them. Even businesses use this site to share awareness of their business and encourage customers to have a more personal engagement with them one-on-one.
When was Twitter created, and why?
Jack Dorsey Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Twitter was founded in March 2006. Odeo was a San Francisco podcasting company and were behind Twitter. Jack Dorsey was one of the 14 employees involved in creating Twitter. He came up with the idea of a site that allows people to share updates with groups of people using SMS messaging. This idea was seen as a good one, and a prototype was made, which was Twitter. Jack was the first person to send a tweet which said, “Just setting up my twttr”. Twitter was the original name; however, after a month, they decided that Twitter was better.
Key moments in the history of Twitter
2006 – Jack Dorsey came up with the concept of Twitter. The idea is that someone could send a text message to a group of people simultaneously. This was then adapted and made into a site named twttr.
March 2006 – The first-ever tweet was by Jack Dorsey, who tweeted, “Just setting up my twttr”. As twttr was being created and programmed, many of the team used the site to communicate due to them not wanting to rack up their phone bill and talking through tweets was free.
July 2006 – Twttr was made public. They decided to change the name from twttr to Twitter.
August 2007 – One of the employees, Chris Messina, came up with the concept of hashtags and how they may benefit the site. As we know today, hashtags were and are a huge part of Twitter.
Chris messina Credit: Wikimedia Commons
November 2008 – Twitter had officially hit 1 billion tweets in two years. This was a considerable achievement.
October 2009 – Once they had hit 1 billion tweets in 2008, the publicity for Twitter skyrocketed. 11 months later, they could reach over 5 billion tweets. This showed that Twitter was only getting bigger and better.
February 2010 – Roughly 50 million Tweets were sent out every day.
March 2011 – Twitter celebrated its fifth anniversary. To show just how much the site had grown in those five years, they showed that over one billion tweets were being sent weekly! This was a massive step that took them two years to achieve, and they could now do it every week. This was reassuring to the creators as it demonstrated that the buzz was still there for the app and that people were still engaging and enjoying this concept.
May 2011 – A feature called ‘TweetDeck’ was introduced to the site. This is similar to Facebook’s news feed. It is an area of the site where all the news from around the world is in one place, so you can stay updated while looking at your feed.
June 2012 – Twitter decided to use a bird as their new design. This was a massive hit due to the fact on the site, you tweet, just like the sound a bird makes. The bird design is now one of the most popular designs and is easily recognised.
August 2013 – Due to Twitter being so popular and so many tweets happening throughout the day, it was starting to get difficult for people to follow a conversation. Due to this complication, they decided to introduce a new feature where linked messages would stay together and display in chronological order. This allowed users to follow a whole conversation a lot easier.
2022 – Twitter is still one of the most popular social networking sites. Many celebrities and politicians use it, and others share memes and personal updates.
Conclusion
The idea behind Twitter was to allow people to text a wide group of people simultaneously and update them on their life. This idea has been achieved; Twitter can be one of the first sites to report if something has happened in someone’s life or elsewhere in the world. Sixteen years later, it is still being used and is one of the most popular sites today.
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If you would like to know some more about other Social Media sites, please check out some of the following blogs:
