15 July 2006: Twitter launched to the public

[Valin]

Money Week:

Ben Judge

15/07/2015

 

If you’re a Twitter user, you may or may not have noticed that today is its birthday. Nine years old today. Perhaps fitting, when you consider some of the output on the platform.

Twitter began life as a simple group messaging service called twttr, developed by Jack Dorsey at a podcasting company called Odeo. Odeo failed at podcasting, and was bought out by a group of its employees, who decided to concentrate on social networking. After making the first tweet in March of 2006, the service was opened to the public on this day on 15 July. It caught on remarkably quickly.

 

Now, Twitter boasts over one billion users; it is home to countless of journalists, celebrities, and corporations, as well as regular people. It is also home to a whole foetid underbelly of stalkers, troglodytes and hateful individuals.

 

The top three users, those with the most followers, are Katy Perry, with 72,160,926; Justin Bieber with 65,183,575; and Barack Obama with 61,604,726 – the average user has a more down-to-earth 208 followers. Half of them have never sent a single tweet.

 

But while it may be a very cool little communications platform, Twitter is still having a hard time making money.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

J.R. Salzman ‏@jrsalzman 24h24 hours ago

I had a lot more faith in humanity before Twitter.

 

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8:36 AM - 14 Jul 2015