If you like to stay in the know of everything going on in the world in a digestible 280-character snippet, you're probably a fan of Twitter. Here are the top five facts you should know about the social media platform, its beginnings and possibly its future.
How Twitter started
Twitter got its start in 2006 with founders Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams, Noah Glass —who all happened to be friends. The microblogging social network was born out of a brainstorming session at Williams’ and Glass’ co-founded podcasting company, Odeo, according to a report by tech news site Lifewire.
The first tweet went up on March 21, 2006 by Dorsey and said, “just setting up my twttr.” Interestingly enough, the test post has earned over 100,000 retweets and likes.
Glass, who was reportedly an essential software developer in the early stages of Twitter, was excluded from further projects in the company after Dorsey, Stone and Williams facilitated a buyback from Twitter’s first group of investors. At the time of the official launch, Dorsey took on the role of CEO, Williams went on to be board member and investor while Stone became the co-founder who built up Twitter’s culture.
Throughout the years, the media company went through a shuffle of business leaders, but these three co-founders are most known to have built Twitter up to what it is today.
Twitter took off in 2007 after the festival South by Southwest (SXSW) saw, “more than 60,000 tweets were sent per day at the event,” according to Lifewire.
Initially, Twitter only allowed posts to have 140 characters. However, that was increased to 280 characters after a decade.
Currently, Twitter has approximately 126 million active users based on a Feb. 2019 report from The Verge. That is a steep increase from the estimated 2.5 million users In June 2009.
Twitter goes public
Twitter made its debut in the stock market with an initial public offer “at $26 a piece” on Nov. 7, 2013. The trading open was at $45.10 and the trading close was $44.90.
Twitter announced its total annual revenue for the fiscal year of 2018 in a press release that covered fourth quarter earnings—which was a self-reported $3 billion. While this amount isn’t anything to laugh at, it is far from Facebook’s reported $55.8 billion in total revenue for that same period.
Twitter’s market cap is approximately at $31.96 billion, according to the NASDAQ.
Twitter’s acquisitions and business ventures
Twitter has made numerous acquisitions and mergers aside from its own business ventures. In the early days, many of Twitter’s purchases were in varied domain names and then eventually went on to larger social media and tech companies.