How Twitter Started
Twitter, launched in 2006, is a micro-messaging service known for its celebrity users, its ease of use and, some might say, its addictiveness. Users can send their "tweets" on a computer, but Twitter is a social media platform explicitly intended for cellphone use, and the growth in smart phone usage has helped it expand worldwide. Twitter's origins are far more modest, however, stemming from a humble text message that saved a dying company.
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Origins
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Twitter is the creation of Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, all former programmers at Odeo Inc., a San Francisco-based podcasting company. Odeo sought to reinvent itself, instigating group brainstorming sessions to come up with ideas. According to Dom Sagolla, a Twitter co-creator, Jack Dorsey came up with the concept of using text messages to spread information, such as a new club opening, to a small group of people.
Development
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Initial work on the idea was completely Web-based and was ready to use on March 21, 2006. Coming up with a name was challenging, but eventually the group settled on the project´s code name, which was "twttr," inspired by Flickr, the photo-sharing site, and the fact that American SMS short codes are five digits. Only months later, the group bought Twitter.com and rebranded the product. At this point no 140-character limit had been imposed. This came when the group realized that a single message of 140 characters plus a user name, which fitted within the 160-character limit of a standard text message, was a useful marketing tool. Jack Dorsey famously tweeted in February 2007, "One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters."
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Growth and Funding
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Odeo became Obvious Corporation, and Jack Dorsey took the CEO position in 2008. At the 2007 South by Southwest festival, Twitter won its first award,and in 2008 the company acquired Summize, a news-feed service for Apple products. In a 2010 interview, Jack Dorsey estimated that Twitter was worth around $1 billion. How does this free service make money? The company has received $57 million in venture capital funding, and, as of 2010, companies can purchase "promoted tweets," an advertising model similar to Google AdWords.
Twitter Users
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At the date of publication, five years after Twitter´s launch, the site had about 200 million users worldwide and almost half a million new accounts opening every day. Some 140 million tweets are sent daily. According to Twitaholic.com, Lady Gaga is the most followed user, with 8.9 million fans following her tweets. Beyond learning about your favorite celebrity, Twitter has many attractions: You can follow your friends or the President of the United States, and browse up-to-the-minute news headlines.
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References
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