With the first-ever tweet made by Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, on the 21st of March, 2006, the immensely popular social media platform was launched. Interestingly, this tweet was sold for $2.9 million early in 2021 with its buyer Malaysian-based Sina Estavi likening it to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The tweet, which said “just setting up my twttr”, laid the foundation to what has now become a company with a market capitalisation of around $50 billion. Today, Twitter boasts roughly 400 million users which include celebrities, politicians, and journalists among a bevy of other celebrated personalities.
Essentially an online microblogging service, Twitter offers a network of users where communication is done throughout the day with brief messages called “tweets”. Initially, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, two ex-employees at Google, created a startup called Odeo, which was meant to be a podcasting platform. However, with the launch and rise of Apple’s iTunes, Odeo was not relevant anymore. Therefore, these two along with Jack Dorsey, an Odeo employee, decided to reinvent themselves and brainstormed new ideas. It was then that Jack came up with the idea of an SMS (Short Message Service) that would allow users to communicate within a small group. This plan eventually evolved into Twitter.
The real strength of Twitter lies in real-time. No other social media comes close to updating its users about the world and its latest happenings. Beyond technology, Twitter has also largely benefitted politics, science, business, journalism, and celebrity culture. By allowing far greater access to public figures than any other platform, facilitating and fueling activism (e.g. #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo), and changing the way news is consumed by the masses (multiple perspectives of the same story and democratization of information), Twitter continues to change the world - as any revolutionary technology is expected to.