On March 21, 2006 Jack Dorsey, an engineer at Odeo, sent the first-ever tweet from @Jack (“just setting up my twttr”). Four month later on July 15, 2006 the San Francisco-based podcasting company Odeo officially released Twttr to the public, and within 6 months changes it’s name to Twitter. [1, 2]
Twitter was founded by Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone. It began as a short messaging service (SMS) for groups, starting with a founder-imposed 140-character limit, which later extended to 280 characters. [3]
In March 2007 the platform used the South by Southwest convention in Texas to “catapult itself into the limelight”, at that time “more than 60,000 tweets were sent per day”. [4]
In September 13, 2013 Twitter tweeted, that they had filed with the SEC to go public, and on November 7, 2013 they officially became a publicly traded company opening at $45.10/share, a value of $31 billion with around 200 million users.
Twitter’s “prominence rose” with the election campaign of President Donald Trump in 2016, he used the platform to get messages to the people which the “fake news” media and “fact checkers” refused to cover without bias. [9, 10, 11] On January 8, 2021 Twitter decided to permanent suspend President Trump’s official account claiming he incited violence.
At the beginning of 2016 Twitter employed 3,900 people and the platform has 500 million tweets sent each day [5], with 310 million users, the user base grew to 330 million by 2018 end [6]. In Q1 2019, Twitter changed its account reporting method to ‘Monetizable Daily Active Users’ (mDAUs). [8]
By year end 2019 the platform had 152 million mDAUs and 2021 yr end 217 million. In 2021 391 million accounts have no followers at all! [7] The “platform hit its peak in Q1 2018 when it clocked in 336 million monthly active users” and declined there after, allegedly due to removing bot accounts.
On October 27, 2022 Elon Musk buys out all of Twitter for $54.20 per share, a takeover that was announced on April 25, 2022. Musk’s objective to make Twitter the “common digital town square” and bring back free speech.