Social media platforms have been with us since 1997, with the birth of the first social media website, SixDegress, according to CBS News. However, the concept became received the springboard it needed from the launch of MySpace and Friendster in the early 2000s, which helped give birth to the social media platforms we know of today: Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, and of course, Twitter.
Believe it or not, Twitter was launched this day in 2007, but it did not reach the prominence it had to become familiar worldwide until the late 2000s and early 2010s when the social media arms race truly began.
Here is how Twitter was born and raised from an obscure social media website into the behemoth it is today.
Twitter History - A Summary Of Events
Twitter was launched on July 15, 2006, by Odeo, a podcasting company based in San Francisco, California, per History. At the time, the social media platform was known as Twttr, a free application that offers users a short messaging service for groups.
The idea came from Twitter's first CEO, Jack Dorsey, who was only a student at New York University at the time. According to Pennington Creative, Dorsey shared an online communication idea with some of his coworkers at Odeo about a platform that allowed users to share short messages with groups of people, similar to sending text messages.
Interestingly, Twitter's original character limit, 140, was the character limit for text messages used on mobile phones at the time.
The idea struck gold. By 2007, the platform started seeing around 20,000 tweets a day, and by 2007, it grew to approximately 60,000 a day thanks to a Southwest Interactive conference, an event that discussed the growing application.
At this point, the company changed Twttr to Twitter, along with changing the company name into Obvious Corporation, thanks to Odeo members, including Dorsey, buying back the company from its investors, per Life Wire.
Since the conference, Twitter was set to become a well-known social media platform in the industry. By 2008, the website started seeing around 300,000 tweets a day on its platform - a number that eventually grew to 50 million tweets a day by early 2010.
The social media platform, which is also known as a microblogging platform at this point, became popular with younger users as a source of breaking news. It further rose to prominence and relevance on 2016, when former president Donald Trump ran for election while using the platform as a way to communicate to his supporters.
Twitter Today
Twitter of today now sees 350,000 tweets made every minute, according to The Fact Site. It has also since increased the maximum character count from 140 to 280, with a new feature called Twitter Notes expanding the character limit to allow for article-long tweets to be published.
It also has 436 million monthly active users as of March 2022, according to a Pew Research Center study, per EarthWeb. Meanwhile, Business of Apps states on its website that the microblogging company had 822 million users by the first quarter of 2022.
Twitter continues to evolve its platform by helping users improve their experience on the platform, with the company testing a new "Custom Timelines" feature that will allow users to view timelines based on a single topic or interest for quicker content aggregation and filtering without the need to search for them, per Tech Crunch.
Related Article: Twitter Is Testing a New 'Custom Timelines' Feature — How Does It Work?
