Twitter turns 5, recalls the journey

Bangalore: In the era of so much facebooking, twitter is one social networking site that has been able to retain its position firm and serene. It has created a niche for itself, which is adored by the masses. It started its initiative with Jack Dorsey as CEO by San Francisco start-up company Obvious Corp five years back. Today this organization employs about 450 full-time staffs.


On the eve of its completion of five years Twitter tweeted about its growth. It said they saw more than 600,000 sign ups on a day. It took them more than 16 months to reach the first 600,000 Twitter accounts. It is pretty impressive that a five a year old organization have become worth for $7 billion in such a short span of time and users of about 200 million, who send more than 1.4 billion tweets per week. Today people tweet about everything, from shopping to munching on to their favorite chocolates.

Let's go through their journey of success, and their milestones that they triggered each time.

Initial take off

The foundation stone of twitter was laid on by Podcasting start-up Odeo on January 2006 and March 2006 it was finally available to the public as Twittr, however the name was changed to twitter on September 2006. It had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007. The tipping point for Twitter's popularity was 2007, during 'South by Southwest' festival. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. This grew to 100 million tweets posted per quarter in 2008. In February 2010, Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day. As of June 2010, about 65 million tweets were posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each second, according to Twitter.

New logo

On September 14, 2010, Twitter launched a redesigned site including a new logo. By March 2010, the company recorded over 70,000 registered applications.

Records

A record was set during the 2010 FIFA World Cup when fans wrote 2,940 tweets per second in the thirty-second period after Japan scored against Cameroon on June 14, 2010. The record was b
roken again when 3,085 tweets per second were posted after the Los Angeles Lakers' victory in the 2010 NBA Finals on June 17, 2010, and then again at the close of Japan's victory over Denmark in the World Cup when users published 3,283 tweets per second. When American singer Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, company servers crashed after users were updating their status to include the words "Michael Jackson" at a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour. On June 2011 even Barack Obama, the U.S. President started tweeting.

Acquisitions

Twitter acquired application developer Atebits on April 11, 2010. Atebits had developed the Apple Design Award-winning Twitter client Tweetie for the Mac and iPhone. On May 2011 tw
itter acquired social media client TweetDeck for upto $50 million. TweetDeck is one of Twitter's top third party customers using software application for internet social networking services. TweetDeck offers a real-time application that allows users to monitor an abundance of information from social networking websites including Twitter in a single concise view. Besides, Twitter also rejected a $500 million acquisition offer from Facebook in 2008.

Challenges

In 1st July 2011 Twitter was investigated by U.S. regulators over its dealings with third-party companies including UberMedia, the firm behind popular BlackBerry and iPhone app
s. The Federal Trade Commission is investigation whether Twitter's business relationships with other companies comply with U.S. antitrust laws.

Hacks

On December 17, 2009, Twitter was attacked. A group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army took credit for the hack, which was later discovered to be a DNS exploit designed to redirec
t users from Twitter.com to a page.