History of Twitter – Know the Origins of the Microblogging Giant

Tap to Read ➤ The acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion by business mogul and billionaire Elon Musk has rocked the tech world. Given this, let’s look at the origins and history of the microblogging giant.

History of Twitter Twitter, an American microblogging and social networking platform was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July 2006.

Its origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of a podcasting company Odeo where Jack Dorsey, a UG students at NYU then, proposed the idea of using an SMS to communicate with a small group.

Idea of Twitter The proposed idea was originally code named as Twttr –credited to Noah Glass and Evan Williams inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes.

Twitter Formalised The idea got formalised as Twitter after an existing domain twitter.com was bought and its service began on March 21, 2006 with the publishing of a first Tweet at 9:50 pm by Jack Dorsey initially made accessible only to Odeo company employees

It was lunched publicly on July 15, 2006 and sprung up as a company in April 2007 following the acquisition of Odeo.com and Twitter.com from the investors and shareholders by board members of Odeo

2007 turned out to be tipping point for Twitter at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference, where the its usage went up to 60,000 tweets per day from a mere 20,000 to 400,000 tweets per quarter in 2007 and 100 million tweets per quarter in 2008.

In February 2010, Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day which increased to 65 million as of June 2010 and Twitter moved up the ladder to 3rd highest-ranking social networking site in Jan 2009 from 22nd.

Twitter's Growth Twitter grew further in its stature and popularity during prominent events like 2010 and 2011 FIFIA World Cups and acquired Atebits on April 11, 2010 which had developed the Apple Design Award-winning Twitter client Tweetie for the Mac and iPhone. By 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day

Between 2010 to 14 Twitter was revamped with new add on features and was announced to be the 10th most downloaded mobile app of the decade, from 2010 to 2019.

On January 28, 2013, Twitter acquired Crashlytics in order to build out its mobile developer products and on April 18, 2013 it launched a music app called Twitter Music for the iPhone while undergoing face change resembling Facebook.

Tweets Characters In November 2017, Tweets originally restricted to 140 characters, was doubled to 280 for non-CJK languages while audio and video tweets remain limited to 140 seconds for most accounts.

Twitter in 2019-20 At the oneset of 2019, Twitter had more than 330 million monthly active users and witnessed experienced considerable growth in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and has more than 25 offices around the world

On April 25, 2022, the Twitter board of directors agreed to a $44 billion buyout by Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, making it one of the biggest deals in the tech world.