Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass in March 2006 and went live in July of the same year. The site quickly gained worldwide popularity, with over 100 million users sending 340 million tweets per day in 2012.
In 2013, the site became one of the most visited websites in the world and received the title of "The SMS of the Internet". As of May 2015, there are over 500 million users on Twitter, 302 million of which are active.
Twitter's history
Creation and first reactions
Twitter's origins came from an all-day brainstorming held at Odeo, a podcast company. Jack Dorsey, an undergraduate student at New York University at the time, developed the idea that an individual could communicate with a small group of users using SMS. The original codename of the project was twttr. Williams later said that the name belonged to Noah Glass and was inspired by Flickr as well as five-character American SMS codes. Another reason why this codename was used was that the domain name twitter.com was already in use at that time. Six months after the launch of twttr, the team bought the domain twitter.com and renamed the service to Twitter. The developers initially thought of using "10958" as the SMS code, but later decided to use "40404" as it was easier to use and catchy. Work on the project began on March 21, 2006, when Jack Dorsey tweeted "I'm setting up my twttr" at 21:50 Pacific Standard Time (PST). Dorsey explained the origin of the name as follows:
"When we came across the name Twitter, we knew it was perfect. The word meant short pieces of information that had no continuity, and that was exactly what our project was."
The first Twitter prototype was developed by an entrepreneur named Dorsey and Florian Weber and made available for Odeo employees to communicate with each other within the company. The service opened to everyone on July 15, 2006.
In October 2006 Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all its assets, including Odeo.com and Twitter.com, from Odeo's investors and shareholders. . Williams fired Glass, who did not play an active role in Twitter's development until 2011. The site grew to become a company in its own right in April 2007. In an interview with him in 2013, Williams made the following statements about this early period of Twitter:
“It was not clear what Twitter actually was. There were those who said it was a social network, there were those who said it was a micro-blogging platform, but it was not easy to define it, because Twitter was not replacing anything that existed until then. As time passed, we began to understand what Twitter really was. We were going through the process. Twitter actually turned into something completely different from what we thought it would be in the beginning. At the very beginning, we thought Twitter would be a social tool where users could update their status information. Actually, it remains so in a way, but after a while we thought that Twitter would be a part of it. We decided it was more of an information network than a social network."
The turning point in Twitter's popularity was the South by Southwest Interactive conference held in 2007. During the event, Twitter's usage rate increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000 tweets. While many critics commented positively on the site's presence at the conference, the team awarded the festival's Web Award with "We wanted to give you a 140-character thank you. And we did it!" He accepted the award with his words.
The first tweet to be automatically posted to Twitter from outside of Earth was NASA astronaut T.J., aboard the International Space Station. It was Creamer's tweet on January 22, 2010. By the end of November 2010, about a dozen tweets a day were sent on the @NASA_Astronauts account used by the astronauts on duty at the station. In addition, NASA held more than 25 meetings called "tweetups". These meetings aimed to enable its participants to use social networks to help NASA achieve its goals.
In August 2010, the company appointed Adam Bain of News Corp's Fox Audience Network as Twitter's Head of Revenue.
The rise of Twitter
The company has grown very quickly in a short time. While 400,000 tweets were sent in each quarter in 2007, this figure reached 100 million tweets in 2008. In February 2010, users sent 50 million Tweets per day. In March of the same year, the company recruited over 70,000 new users, while in August 65 million tweets were sent per day, in other words 750 tweets per second. In March 2011, the number of tweets sent daily reached 140 million. According to an article published on Compete.com, the site became the third most used social networking site in the world in January 2009.
The use of Twitter is increasing especially during events that are followed by a large number of people. For example, during the 2010 FIFA World Cup, 2,940 tweets were sent per second in the 30-second period following Japan's goal against Cameroon on 14 June. This record was later broken with 3,085 tweets per second after the Los Angeles Lakers won the 2010 NBA Finals on June 17. Then again during the World Cup, during Japan's win over Denmark, 3,283 tweets were sent per second. During the match played during the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup Final between Japan and the United States, 7,196 tweets were sent per second. When American singer Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, the Twitter servers crashed, as users sent over 100,000 tweets containing the words "Michael Jackson" in an hour.
Twitter acquired app developer Atebits on April 11, 2010. Atebits developed the Tweetie app for Mac and iPhone platforms, a Twitter client that also won an Apple Design Award. The same application became the official application of Twitter after a while and started to be distributed free of charge for iPhone, iPad and Mac platforms.
Between September and October 2010, the company launched its completely redesigned twitter.com site. Among the changes made was the ability to view pictures and videos without leaving the site. The activation of the new design in all users' accounts was completed on 1 November 2010.
On April 5, 2011, the site switched to a new homepage design, but due to some technical errors in the design, this new design started to be used on April 20.
On December 8, 2011, the site renewed its design once again, making it easier for new members to find users to follow and making the ads on the site more prominent. This new design of the site was similar to Facebook's design.
On February 21, 2012, Twitter and Yandex went into a union. Russian search engine Yandex stated that they found Twitter's real-time news feed valuable, while the company's Business Development Director expressed his satisfaction with this partnership.
On March 21, 2012, Twitter celebrated its sixth birthday and stated in its congratulatory message that 140 million users on the site send 340 million tweets every day. This figure was 40% more than the 100 million users the company announced in September 2011.
Twitter announced in April 2012 that it opened a branch in the US state of Detroit. The company cited its desire to be in a closer relationship with the automotive industry and marketing agencies as the reason for choosing Detroit. The company also opened an office in Dublin, the capital of Ireland, at the same time.
On June 5, 2012, the new Twitter logo was announced in an announcement on the company's blog. The company acquired Vine, a video clip company, on October 5, 2012, and announced the Vine service in January 2013. Vine, which started broadcasting on January 24, 2013, allowed users to share 6-second video loops. While the videos shared on Vine could be viewed directly on the Twitter application, the Vine application could be downloaded for those aged 17 and over on Apple's application store, due to the large number of adult videos uploaded to the site.
Twitter announced on December 18, 2012 that the number of monthly active users reached 200 million. On April 18, 2013, the company announced Twitter Music, a music application, for the iPhone platform.
The company acquired Trendrr on August 28, 2013, and MoPub on September 9, 2013. In September, the company's 200 million active users were sending over 400 million tweets per day, and about 60% of these tweets were sent via portable devices.
On June 4, 2014, Twitter announced that it would acquire Namo Media, a company specializing in "native advertising" for portable devices.
The company came to the fore with the news of a new acquisition on June 19, 2014. Twitter has acquired SnappyTV, which allows video publishers and copyright holders to share their videos both on the site and on social media through Twitter's program called Amplify.
In July 2014, the company acquired CardSpring, a platform that allows stores to send discount checks directly to the credit card accounts of users who shop online, allowing the same users to use these checks while shopping at physical stores.
The company acquired Mitro, a company specializing in password security, on July 21, 2014.
On October 29, 2014, the company announced a new partnership with IBM. With this partnership, the company announced that it aims to help institutions better understand their customers, other institutions and trends by using Twitter data.
On March 13, 2015, Twitter announced that it had acquired Periscope. Thanks to Periscope, users were able to broadcast live on their portable devices.
In April 2015, the Twitter.com desktop homepage design was changed again, but some errors that appeared right after the change was activated caused the old homepage design to remain live for a while. The company started using the new design on April 20, 2015 after fixing the bugs.
Twitter's IPO
Twitter reported that on September 12, 2013, it filed for an IPO with the United States Stock Exchange and Equity Market Authority. In its 800-page application, the company stated that it aims to raise $1 billion through the IPO. In its application, the company reported that more than 200 million active users on the site send more than 500 million tweets per day.
On October 15, 2013, Twitter announced that it would be listed on the New York Stock Market. Until then, the market thought the company would be traded on the NASDAQ. The company launched 70 million shares on November 6, 2013 at $26 per share.
Twitter, which started its first trading day on the NYSE at $26, closed the day at $44.90 per share, raising its value to $31 billion. This price was $18.90 more than the predicted price of $26 per share, and the company raised $24.46 billion from the market. It was announced that Williams, one of the founders of the company, earned 2.56 billion dollars, Dorsey's 1.05 billion dollars and Costolo's 345 million dollars as a result of this public offering. On December 13, 2013, the company's market value was 32.76 billion dollars.
On February 5, 2014, the company released its first financial report as a publicly traded company, reporting a net loss of $511 million in the fourth quarter of 2013.
The company had a total market capitalization of $15.69 billion as of December 30, 2015.