Twitter is now three-years-old, after being launched in March 2006. Back then, it was known as Twttr and was the domain of the super-geeky. Today, Twitter (I’m so glad the name was changed) is celebrating its third birthday by going mainstream.

Most people have only been on Twitter for maybe one to two years. In fact, the majority of you reading this probably have accounts that are months, rather than years, old. However, the company and the service has been in existence for three years to the day, going live at 1:02 p.m. Pacific, on March 21, 2006. At least according to a tweet by Jack Dorsey, one of the company’s founders.

Twitter started as an R&D side project inside podcasting company, Odeo. It was founded by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams but started life just being used internally by employees at Odeo.

Both TechCrunch and Om Malik wrote about Twitter early on, and it’s interesting to read back on the views of these hardheaded technology journalists. Both had some reservations about the service at this stage way back in 2006, which I’d assume have disappeared over time.

Twitter has achieved a lot in its first three years, although it must be said that most of the innovation has come from outside the company itself. Thanks to its API (application programming interface), many external applications have cropped up allowing different ways of using the basic service.

At this stage in its life, Twitter looks set to firmly be embraced by the mainstream. Recent research by Nielsen Online shows it to be by far the fastest growing member community over the last 12 months. Twitter has gone from having 475,000 unique visitors in Feb ‘08 to having 7,038,000 in Feb ‘09. That’s a whopping increase of 1,382 percent.

Crucially, Twitter doesn’t yet have a monetization plan in action, and there has been much debate over the best way of turning the service into a profit-making venture without upsetting those millions of users. But with $35 million of venture capital in the bank, and a value estimated at $250 million, there doesn’t seem much rush to solve the problem.

Twitter is now approaching mainstream take-off, but it’ll be a while, if ever, until it reaches the level of popularity enjoyed by Facebook (around 175 million users). However, Facebook clearly feels threatened, which is why it tried to buy Twitter last year, and then chose instead to copy it with a new layout.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 10:46 pm under Internet, Opinion, Social Media, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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