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Jack Dorsey, an American Software architect and the co-founder of Twitter, first tweeted on March 22, 2006. His first tweet read, ‘ just setting up my twttr’.Little did he know that in just a short span of six years, twitter would gain such popularity where people across the world would be sending over 9,420 tweets per second.
Twitter is a joint venture of Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, started in San Francisco under the banner called Obvious, designed not with the perspective to earn. It took about 3 years for Twitter to reach it is first billion tweets. But at today’s date, it takes less than a week to reach the number that took 3 years to reach. The privacy, intimacy and the liberty to get in touch with celebrities, institutions and well known personalities directly has been one of the USPs of Twitter, ‘no advertising’ being the other.
Known as the ‘SMS of the Internet’, the popularity of Twitter today has reached an extent where research has shown that twitter may be harder to resist than cigarettes, alcohol, caffeine, sleep and sex.
Starting with a 5 member team, Twitter has flourished the business to the extent where the company have employed over 835 employess and is available in 28 languages. Raising funds upto $400 million from private investors and the company being valued upto $10 billion due to the purchase of twitter stakes by Prince Walid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia in December 2011, Twitter has a long way to go.
The very use of this social networking site during the disputed presidential election in Iran in June 2009 for the dissemination of information earned it a new respect. Since then it has been engaging the political crowd a lot and have become an inseparable part of the elite group of the social web start ups.
As per Alexa’s Web Traffic Analysis, Twitter is one of the ten most visited websites worldwide. Whereas the blog entry of compete.com in February 2009, ranked the site as the third most used social networking site, based on the 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visitors count. Again in february 2009, Twitter recorded an annual growth of 1382% i.e., increasing to 7 million users from 475000 unique visitors in February 2008.