When you hear the word ‘Trend’, does a social media platform come to your mind? How about, when you hear the word ‘hashtag’, is there a particular social media platform that pops up on your mind? Well hashtags and trending are phrases that we incorporate on almost all social media platforms presently. However, back in the year 2007, Chris Messina was trying to incorporate the idea of hashtag into his platform, Twitter. Twitter adopted hashtags formally in the year 2009. Since then, gradually the use of hashtags and group ideas, topics, and issues in trend with the use of hashtags became a major part of the popular social media platform, Twitter.
If you are a netizen who uses Twitter, you might be quite aware of the ins and outs of the social media platform. Keeping that aside, have you ever wondered how this popular social network site came into existence.
Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams created Twitter. Twitter’s idea was born from a creative discussion by the board members of a podcasting company called Odeo. Jack Dorsey introduced the concept of an individual using a text message to communicate with a group. He was still an undergraduate student at the New York University back then. He published the first Twitter message on March 21, 2006. The message read, “just setting up my twttr”. The work on the project of the Twitter concept began right after. Odeo’s employees used the Twitter’s first prototype as an internal service. Dorsey developed it with a contractor named Florain Weber.
The developers released the full version for public usage on July 15, 2006. Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey and other Odeo members together formed the Obvious Corporation in October 2006. They also acquired Odeo and its assets-including Odeo.com and Twitter.com from its investors and shareholders. Later, Williams fired Glass, as he was silent about his part in startup until 2011. Twitter developed into its own company in the year 2007.
An important event in Twitter’s journey is the South by Southwest Interactive conference, 2007. Twitter usage saw 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000 tweets during the event.
In the year 2012, Twitter opened an office in Detroit. Their goal then was to work with automotive brands and advertising companies. That followed, Twitter expanding its office in Dublin. In the same year, Twitter reached a milestone of surpassing 200 million monthly active users. They announced this achievement on December 18, 2012.
In the year 2016, Twitter saw takeover approaches from companies like Alphabet, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Verizon and The Walt Disney Company. This resulted in Twitter shares levitating 20 % in September 2016.
Twitter announced about their plan to establish their African headquarters in Ghana in April 2021.
The year 2022 saw Elon Musk taking interest in the popular social media platform. He bought 9.1 % of Twitter for a price of $2.64 billion. This resulted in Twitter’s stock jumping to 27 %.
Twitter offered Musk a seat in their board of directors. This however prohibited one from acquiring more than 14.9 % of the company. Musk decided not to join the board.
Following that, Musk offered to buy Twitter for a price of $43 billion. On April 2022, Musk secured a tender offer of $46.5 billion to buy Twitter. However, later Musk backed out from the deal due to transparency issues in Twitter’s algorithm that he discovered. Twitter took to court and launch their lawsuit formally against Musk on July 12.
