New York — Just 1,825 days ago, at 4:50 p.m. on March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey dispatched a five-word message over a new service he had just finished formulating with a team of programmers: wrote “just setting up my twttr.” Surprisingly since then, the wildly popular microblogging service Twitter Inc. has come a long way and on March 21, 2011 celebrated its fifth anniversary of the first tweet ever sent with a video featuring stars from the worlds of science, politics, sports and art saying how they use the service.
If you read this message back then, you might certainly have believed that Dorsey was starting a pet shop that specialized in exotic birds. In fact, he was sending the first-ever Twitter message.
Now Twitter, which is has come a long way and worth billions of dollars, owes its significant mainstream attractions to the celebrities who advocate the service, is honoring the occasion with a hashtag (“#5yrs”), and set up a new Web site called Discover Twitter, which tries to showcase how people have grown to use the service, and a star-studded promotional video featuring the likes of Hillary Clinton, Martha Stewart, Snoop Dogg, and Richard Branson.
Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s co-founders, said in a blog post that more than 140 million messages are dispatched across the network each day; that is up to 1 billion every eight days. Stone also indicated that Twitter was adding nearly 500,000 new users each day.
The star-studded clip on YouTube features entrepreneur Richard Branson, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, decorating maven Martha Stewart, U.S. Speaker of the House John Boehner, Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli and entertainer Snoop Dogg, who all explain how they use Twitter.
“5 yrs ago today, the eve of launching twttr to the company. Moving from @Biz, @florian & me, to all of our peers using it. Nervous. #twttr,” Dorsey tweeted. “Today 5 years ago was a Monday. @Florian was back in Germany & I spent the day cleaning & getting ready to send the first tweet tmrw. #twttr.”
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wished his 400-person company happy birthday here.
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