“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you” etc. etc..
Today marks the birthday of something very special.
No, not Timothy Dalton. We are of course referring to the worlds favourite micro-blogging service, Twitter, which turned four today.
The business was founded in San Francisco in 2006 and has since grown at an astonishing rate, now employing around 400 people.
The first Tweet was sent by co-founder Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006;
“just setting up my twttr”
Not very inspiring, but relevant none the less.
It took three years for Twitter to pass the billion-tweet mark, but now with the help of it’s users – me, you, Obama, Bieber and everyone else, Twitter now sees more than 50 million tweets per day.
To many, Twitter is still a very new concept. Everyone ‘gets’ Facebook now, even your mum. Twitter is still somewhat mysterious and until you use it, it’s very difficult to appreciate it.
Courtesy of The Independent, here are some more statistics to chew on;
- Twitter has more than 200 million registered users sending more than 140 million tweets a day
- Last year, Twitter users sent 25 billion tweets and the company added more than 100 million new registered accounts
- It has averaged 460,000 new accounts per day over the past month
- Pop star Lady Gaga has the most Twitter followers with 8.78 million
- Actor Charlie Sheen (@charliesheen) was the fastest to one million followers, picking them up in just 24 hours
- The hashtag (#) feature on Twitter which groups tweets by subject debuted in August 2007, proposed by a user
- In October 2009, Google and Microsoft began integrating tweets into their search products
- Twitter has 400 employees and is adding workers almost weekly
- Twitter is based in San Francisco, with additional employees in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington
- Twitter was incorporated in April 2007; it was co-founded by Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey – @biz, @ev and @jack
- The initial Twitter logo was created by Stone, a former graphic designer
- Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo is a former improvisational comedian
Quite impressive.
“#HappyBirthday @Twitter” – here’s to a bright future.
