Twitter is an online social
networking and microblogging service that enables users to send
and read short 140-character text messages, called
"tweets". Registered users can read and post tweets, but unregistered
users can only read them. Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco and has offices in New York City, Boston,
Austin and Detroit. Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan
Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass and by July 2006 the site was launched.
The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 500 million registered users in 2012, who posted 340 million
tweets per day. In 2013 Twitter was one of the ten most-visited
websites, and has
been described as "the SMS of the Internet."
Twitter's origins lie in a
"daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo.
Dorsey, then an undergraduate student at New
York University,
introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a
small group. The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later
ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr
and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The developers initially
considered "10958" as a short code, but later changed it to
"40404" for "ease of use and memorability." Work on the
project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter
message at 9:50 PM Pacific
Standard Time
(PST): "just setting up my twttr". Dorsey has explained the origin of
the "Twitter" title: ...we came across the word 'twitter', and it was
just perfect. The definition was 'a short burst of inconsequential information,'
and 'chirps from birds'. And that's exactly what the product was.
With Twitter, it wasn't clear what
it was. They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it
was hard to define, because it didn't replace anything. There was this path of
discovery with something like that, where over time you figure out what it is.
Twitter actually changed from what we thought it was in the beginning, which we
described as status updates and a social utility. It is that, in part, but the
insight we eventually came to was Twitter was really more of an information
network than it is a social network.
In August 2010, the company
appointed Adam Bain from News Corp.'s Fox
Audience Network as
president of revenue. The
company experienced rapid growth. It had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in
2007. This grew to 100 million tweets posted per quarter in 2008. In February
2010, Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day. By March 2010, the
company recorded over 70,000 registered applications. As of June 2010, about 65
million tweets were posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each
second, according to Twitter. As of March 2011, that was about 140 million
tweets posted daily. As noted on Compete.com, Twitter moved up to the
third-highest-ranking social networking site in January 2009 from its
previous rank of twenty-second.
On November 7, 2013, the first day
of trading on the NYSE, Twitter shares opened at $26.00 and closed at US$44.90,
giving the company a valuation of around US$31 billion. This was $18.90 above
the initial offering price and Twitter ended with a market capitalization of
$24.46 billion. The paperwork from November 7 shows that among the founders,
Williams received a sum of US$2.56 billion and Dorsey received US$1.05 billion,
while Costolo's payment was US$345 million. As of 13 December 2013, Twitter had "a market
capitalization of $32.76 billion". On
February 5, 2014, Twitter published its first results as a public company,
showing a net loss of $511 million in the fourth quarter of 2013.
In 2012, the country with the most
active users on Twitter was China. Following is a list of the countries with
the most active Twitter users:
- China- 35.5 million
- India- 33.0 million
- U.S.- 22.9 million
- Brazil- 19.6 million
- Mexico- 11.7 million
As of May 21, 2014, these are the
top Twitter accounts with the most followers:
- Katy Perry- 53,134,789
- Justin Bieber- 51,734,936
- Barack Obama- 43,106,983
- YouTube- 42,106,400
- Lady Gaga- 41,421,791
- Taylor Swift- 40,874,716
- Britney Spears- 37,253,827
- Rihanna- 35,405,688
- Instagram- 32,707,550
10. Justin Timberlake 32,280,340