Micro-blogging site, Twitter completed five years on Friday. Launched on July 15, 2006, San-Francisco based Twitter was received with a lot of skepticism. Yet five years later, it not only survives but flourishes.
Twitter, then called Twittr, was described as a ‘new mobile service that helps groups of friends bounce random thoughts around with SMS.’
Today, the microblogging platform has grown into something founders, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams could have hardly imagined.
Quoting on Twitter growth mileages, The Next Web, says, “It took Twitter more than 16 months to reach the first 600,000 Twitter accounts. On Thursday, there were more than 600,000 signups in a single day.”
To celebrate its 5th birthday, Twitter sent out a few fantastic statistics, including this one:
“There were 224 tweets sent on July 15, 2006. Today, users send that many tweets in less than a tenth of a second.”
The 2007 South by Southwest festival was the turning point for Twitter’s popularity. During the festival, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000 tweets per day. Since, then Twitter’s popularity has rocketed.
In fact, today, Women’s soccer sealed a brand new tweets per second record today during the Women’s soccer world cup final.
Twitter’s own Tweet, says, “New Tweets per second records! End of the WWC Final – 7196 Tweets per second(TPS). The Paraguay-Brazil game is now 2nd with 7166 TPS.”
However, the one question that everybody wants an answer to is how will Twitter make any money?
The obvious answer is by implementing advertising and sponsored Tweets. Twitter finally a found a way to actually be worth something beyond an alternative messaging service and become a major player in the tech world. Although it hasn’t gone public yet, and likely won’t for the immediate future, Twitter’s estimated value is $ 7 billion.
Twitter is also doing its best to consolidate its position by eliminating support for third-party platform clients, buying out some of the better ones like TweetDeck. It has also surpassed one million registered applications for gaming, analytics and more.
The proof of the pudding lies in its eating, they say. When the President of the United States hosts a town hall event solely on Twitter, you know the Twitter pudding is very sweet.
Of course, the path ahead for Twitter might be strewed with competition, especially from Google+ and it is possible that Twitter could look drastically different in the coming years. Yet, for the moment, Twitter isn’t going anywhere but up.