Happy fourth birthday, Twitter!
It seems like only yesterday we all first logged into Twitter, and surprisingly, it actually wasn’t all that long ago!
Originally the product of a brainstorming session at the podcasting company Odeo, the service started life as a way for people to use text messages to update friends on things they were doing. The original codename was “status”, and then changed to Twttr, a hat tap to photo sharing service Flickr. Eventually the service added vowels, and off it went.
The very first message was sent on the service at March 21st, 2006 9:50 p.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST) by co-founder Jack Dorsey, and it said “just setting up my twttr“.
After that the service gained some attention, but not a whole lot. Twitter really invaded the Internet at the South by Southwest conference in 2007, jumping from an average of 20,000 Tweets, the nickname for messages sent on the service, up to 60,000. From there on out the service took off, gaining more and more momentum by the day.
Once celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher, most famous for That 70′s Show and Punk’d, came on to the service, it got a tremendous amount of mainstream public attention, and it seemed the service was adding new users at a staggering pace. The growth has slowed down, but it is still gaining new users every day.
While the service suffered a lot of growing pains, often resulting in the site going down and finding yourself with a picture of a whale that came to be known as “the Fail Whale”, it has become much more stable over the years. It is certainly not completely stable at this point, but it is improving.
Many people still question how the site is surviving as it has received $160 million in venture capital thus far, but the company has not given any indication of a steady revenue stream as of yet. There are suspicions that an advertising platform may be introduced next month at a Twitter sponsored developer’s conference, but that is strictly rumor at this point.
Happy birthday, Twitter, and here’s to many more.
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