On Friday 20th March, Twitter marked 9 years. The company’s CCO Gabriel Stricker posted a look back at some famous first tweets, including the first-ever tweet from CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, back when Twitter was known as “Twttr”, no vowels were used. Since the first ever tweet in 2006, the micro-blogging site has grown with more than 284 million users worldwide, with over 15 million based in the UK.
The first ever twitter was by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and it read: ‘’@jack just setting up my twttr. ‘’
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass and launched by July 2006. 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.”
But apart from that we sort nine interesting things that you need to know about twitter. Here we go:
1. The first tweet was sent in by CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST):. ‘’just setting up my twttr’’
2. The first suggestion for using a hashtag as a means of a creating a group conversation regarding a single event came in 2007 from early Twitter user Chris Messina, who suggested they would be useful for linking comments on the same issues and creating shared messages.
3. Twitter 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, equalling 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.
4. When Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, Twitter servers crashed after users were updating their status to include the words “Michael Jackson” at a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour. The current record as of August 3, 2013 was set in Japan, with 143,199 tweets per second (beating the previous record of 33,388, also set by Japan after a television screening of the movie “Castle In The Sky”)
5. Twitter acquired application developer Atebits on April 11, 2010. Atebits had developed the Apple Design Award-winning Twitter client Tweetie for the Mac and iPhone. The application, now called “Twitter” and distributed free of charge, is the official Twitter client for the iPhone, iPad and Mac.
6. On June 5, 2012, a modified logo was unveiled through the company blog, removing the text to showcase the slightly redesigned bird as the sole symbol of Twitter.
7. In 2010 in a royal first, Clarence House, the Prince of Wales’s private office, created a Twitter account to announce Prince William’s engagement to Kate Middleton
8. In 2014: Twitter showed its power as a companion to TV with what remains the most retweeted post to date: Ellen DeGeneres’s Oscars photo, which has been re-tweeted more than three million times since
9. On October 29, 2014, Twitter announced a new partnership with IBM. The partnership is intended to help businesses use Twitter data to understand their customers, businesses and other trends.
Want to know your first tweet, click here to find out. I just found mine 🙂
