On July 15, 2006, Twitter was born. Today the social media platform is a digital giant with around 6,000 employees and more than 300 million users worldwide.
It began fifteen years ago as a side project of Odeo, a San Francisco-based podcasting platform, when it officially launched Twttr, later on, Twitter, its group short message service (SMS) to the public.
The free app was born as a side project outside of Odeo’s main podcasting platform and allowed users to share brief status updates with groups of friends by texting a single number (‘40404’).
Over the next few years, when Twttr became Twitter, the simple ‘microblogging’ service grew in popularity and became one of the world’s leading social media platforms.
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Twitter co-founder Evan Williams made a name for himself in the tech world of Silicon Valley by starting the web calendar publishing service Blogger, which he sold to Google for millions of dollars in 2003.
In 2005, William co-founded Odeo with another entrepreneur, Noah Glass; That fall, however, the main Odeo service was shut down when Apple launched iTunes (including an integrated podcasting platform).
After Williams asked the team of 14 to share their best startup ideas, one of the company’s engineers, Jack Dorsey, came up with the concept of a service that would allow users to send personal status updates to groups of people via SMS.
By March 2006, they had a working prototype and the name Twttr, which was partially inspired by the sounds of birds and adopted after other options (including FriendStalker) were rejected. Dorsey (@Jack) posted the first tweet (“I just setup my twttr”) on March 21st.
Today the engineer with the idea for a group text service is now CEO of Twitter. Jack Dorsey has come under fire for his efforts to censor the content of his website in this age of tense public discourse.
Unlike other networks like Facebook and Instagram, people see Twitter as a place to find cultural analysis and breaking news. Politicians have used Twitter successfully, including former Presidents Barack and Obama and Donald Trump.
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Like other social media companies, Twitter and CEO Dorsey have come under pressure to monitor the site’s content more closely to prevent bullying, harassment, and hate speech and to better protect the lives of its users.
In 2021, Twitter’s net worth was $35 billion. In the fourth quarter of 2019, revenues were $1.01 billion.
It generated $885 million in advertising revenue, up 17% year over year, with overall ad interactions increasing 29%.
