Twitter

Twitter is a social networking platform that allows its users to send and read micro-blogs of up to 280-characters known as tweets. It enables registered users to read and post their tweets through the web, short message service (SMS), and mobile applications. 

As a global real-time communications platform, Twitter has more than 400 million monthly visitors and 255 million monthly active users around the world. Twitter’s active group of registered members includes World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations, and entertainment outlets. It is currently available in more than 35 languages. 

Launched in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass. Twitter is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA, with local offices in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Boulder, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Sunnyvale, and Washington. Twitter's international offices are located in Amsterdam, Berlin, Dublin, London, Madrid, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Sydney, Seoul, Tokyo, Toronto, and Vancouver.

The business magnate and investor Elon Musk closed a $44 billion deal and announced in April 2022 to take Twitter Inc (TWTR) private, getting ownership of the influential social media platform by firing top executives immediately.

2006: The full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. On the one hand, by early as the summer, there was already plenty of evidence that some users found Twitter impossibly addictive.

2007: Interest in the platform sharply increased after it was presented at the South by Southwest music and technology conference in Austin, Texas, in March. Later in June, Twitter holds its first round of funding, raising $5 million and receiving a valuation of $20 million. As well, in August, the hashtag "#" makes its debut, supposedly started by user Chris Messina.

2008: In October, with frustration over unaddressed server failures and the encouragement of Evan Williams, Twitter's shareholders remove Jack Dorsey replacing him with Williams. 

2009: Witter moved up to the third-highest-ranking social networking site in January, from its previous rank of twenty-second. Twitter’s social networking roots were obvious in April when actor Ashton Kutcher emerged as the victor in a race with CNN to become the first Twitterer to collect more than a million followers. Twitter executives Evan Williams and Biz Stone are listed among Time's 100 most influential people in the world. Twitter truly established itself as an emerging outlet for the dissemination of information during the events surrounding the Iranian presidential election in June 2009. Twitter is rumoured to have had e-commerce plans and opened firehose access to Google and Bing. When American singer Michael Jackson died on June 25, Twitter servers crashed after users were updating their status to include the words "Michael Jackson" at a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour.

2010: Following the earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010, Twitter reaffirmed its role as a powerful tool for the dissemination of information. The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010. By February this year, Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day. Twitter acquired application developer Atebits on April 11. From September through October, the company began rolling out "New Twitter", an entirely revamped edition of twitter.com.

2011: In March, five years after Twitter was born, Howard Stern had Christopher "Biz" Stone on his show. On April 5, Twitter tested a new homepage and phased out the "Old Twitter". However, a glitch came about after the page was launched, so the previous "retro" homepage was still in use until the issues were resolved; the new homepage was reintroduced on April 20. Later in June, Cofounder Biz Stone announces their departure from his day-to-day role at Twitter. In July, The White House hosts a Twitter town hall with President Barack Obama and Jack Dorsey as moderators. Twitter hit 100 million monthly active users in September this year. Vijaya Gadde joined as general counsel and the head of legal, policy, and trust at Twitter. Prior to joining the company, Vijaya was senior director, of legal at Juniper Networks; previously, for nearly a decade she worked at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Also, Evan Williams fired Noah Glass one of its founders, who was silent about his part in Twitter's startup until 2011. Noah Glass, who had not updated his Twitter, YouTube, or blog accounts in almost two years, posted to Twitter that he was "putting life into cardboard. moving back to San Francisco. back to life."

2012: On February 21, it was announced that Twitter and Yandex agreed to a partnership. On March 21, Twitter celebrated its sixth birthday while also announcing that it had 140 million users and 340 million tweets per day. In April, Twitter announced that it was opening an office in Detroit, with the aim of working with automotive brands and advertising agencies. On June 5, a modified logo was unveiled through the company blog, removing the text to showcase the slightly redesigned bird as the sole symbol of Twitter. Stone and Ben Finkel began work on a new venture, Jelly, a search app in which users posted questions that were answered by others in their social network.

2013: Twitter released Vine as a standalone app that allows users to create and share six-second looping video clips on January 24. On April 18, Twitter launched a music app called Twitter Music for the iPhone. On August 28, Twitter acquired Trendrr, followed by the acquisition of MoPub on September 9. The company's data showed that 200 million users sent over 400 million tweets daily, with nearly 60% of tweets sent from mobile devices. The platform's dominant spot came under fire with Instagram's introduction of the 15-second video clip.

2014: In April, Twitter underwent a redesign that made the site resemble Facebook somewhat, with a profile picture and biography in a column left to the timeline, and a full-width header image with a parallax scrolling effect. On June 19, Twitter announced that it had reached an undisclosed deal to buy SnappyTV, a service that helps edit and share video from television broadcasts. In July, Twitter announced that it intended to buy a young company called CardSpring for an undisclosed sum. By the end of July, Twitter announced that it had acquired a small password-security startup called Mitro. On October 29, Twitter announced a new partnership with IBM. The partnership was intended to help businesses use Twitter data to understand their customers, businesses and other trends. In December, Twitter releases new anti-harassment tools and announces that more effort will be put toward curbing online abuse.

2015: On March 13, Twitter announced its acquisition of Periscope, an app that allows the live streaming of video. Jack Dorsey returned as CEO in October. Twitter added a new feature, Moments, which allowed users and the service itself to create curated thematic collections of tweets and other content. This model generated around $400 million in revenue.

2016: Later in the year it became apparent that growth had slowed, according to Fortune, Business Insider, Marketing Land and other news websites including Quartz. In June, Twitter acquired an artificial intelligence startup called Magic Pony for $150 million. Following changes of leadership, social media talent agencies drafted and discarded plans for fusing Twitter and Vine, and a failed attempt at selling the platform, Twitter shut down Vine in October. The “machine learning algorithms” (introduced by Twitter in 2016) personalized 99% of users' feeds by displaying Tweets, even older Tweets and Retweets from accounts the user had not directly followed. But that the algorithm had "deemed relevant" to the user's past preferences.

2017: The character limit of a tweet was increased from 140 to 280 characters. Twitter finally became profitable in the last quarter, when it had 330 million monthly users. 

2018: Since May, tweet replies deemed by artificial intelligence to be detractive from the conversation are initially hidden, and only loaded through actuating a Show more replies button at the bottom. Later in September, Jack Dorsey testifies before the United States senate alongside Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Dalana Brand joined Twitter as chief people and diversity officer, prior she was vice president of Total Rewards for Electronic Arts, Inc.

2019: In June, Twitter reveals data showing thousands of fake accounts linked to foreign governments like Iran and Russia. In October, the tweet history of the Fortnite video game's account was resurrected after appearing deleted during a marketing campaign. Early in the year, Twitter switched from tracking monthly users to “monetizable daily active users,” the number of users in a day who were exposed to ads. Twitter redesigned its user interface yet again. The Twitter research team that began work on this effort was set up in late 2019.

2020: In November, Twitter announced that it would develop a social audio feature on its platform. Twitter saw somewhat dramatic growth this year, possibly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

2021: On January 26, Twitter acquired Revue, an email newsletter service to compete with platforms like Substack. On February 25, Twitter announced Super Follows, a subscription service allowing content creators to receive payments for their content. In March, Twitter started beta testing Spaces for Android users. Later in April, Twitter announced that it was establishing its African headquarters in Ghana. As well, Twitter introduced Spaces, in which accounts with more than 600 followers could host live audio conversations. On May 3, Twitter Spaces was released globally. Twitter announced the sale of MoPub to AppLovin, the selling price was reported at $1.05 billion. In November, Jack Dorsey stepped down as CEO again and was replaced by chief technology officer Parag Agrawal. By this year the service had 217 million monetizable daily active users.

2022: In January, Twitter finalized the sale of MoPub to AppLovin. As well, Twitter announced that it was to be purchased by South African-born American entrepreneur Elon Musk for $44 billion providing little clarity over how he will achieve the ambitions he has outlined for the influential social media platform.

“To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers.”

“We believe in free expression and think every voice has the power to impact the world.”