Over the years, Twitter has gone from a small start-up project that had no more than 100 users to a social networking phenomenon. Some have a hard time explaining this inexplicable growth.
The beginning of Twitter was just an idea held at a daylong brainstorming session held by the pod casting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of Twitter to serve as an SMS Service to communicate with a small group. The original name for Twitter was Twttr until it was renamed later on. Early on, Twttr was used primarily by the Odeo company.
The turning point of Twitter’s popularity was at the south by southwest festival Twitter cleverly placed 2 big screen televisions and streamed the tweets live for people to watch and see. After this event, Twitter witnessed an immediate boost in popularity up to 60,000 tweets per day.
The growth of tweets per quarter from 2007- 2008 was a staggering 500,000 to 100 million increase. The year after was even more, 100 million to 2 billion. In 2010, 4 billion Tweets were posted in the first quarter; it was a staggering number that baffled most industry experts. Most experts contribute the increase to the fact that Twitter is user friendly and the design is very intuitive.
Some of Twitters allure stems from the fact that it is based off text messages. Each Twitter message must be less than 140 characters, the same length as a traditional SMS text message. Many people join Twitter so they can post status updates about themselves. The more followers you amass, the higher impact your tweets can have. While many of the tweets are pointless “spam,” many others do serve an actual service, often times to update people on current events.
Many news services such as CNN and Fox News utilize Twitter to update followers on network status, current events and other important topics. Since Twitter updates in real-time, it is possible for followers to know everything that is happening with a certain situation. In addition to news services, Twitter is increasingly used as a business promotion tool. For example, in 2009 Dell Inc. reported they earned nine million in profits purely from Twitter.
The amazing growth of Twitter can be hard for many people to fathom. The truth is, people are narcissistic and love it when thousands of people know exactly what they are doing at all times of the day. One thing is for certain, Twitter’s growth will not slow down anytime in the future as more and more people join every day.
