Happy 10 Years Twitter!
Yes, it’s official… Twitter is 10 years old today and of course its own birthday hashtag is trending! I want to pay tribute to my favourite network with 10 great facts about Twitter… Happy 10 Years Twitter!
#LoveTwitter
#1 Twitter Fail Whale
The illustration that came to be known as the Fail Whale features a serene beluga being lifted out of the waves by a flock of orange birds. Artist Yiying Lu named it “Lifting a Dreamer” and it was present at times when Twitter got overloaded and the platform wasn’t available. It ceased to be used after 2013 but prompted tons of tattoos, paintings and even a beer!
#2 Most Popular Tweet
Ellen breaks the record during the Oscars ceremony, with a world-renowned tweet. The tweet went to well over 3 million … well it is a pretty cool selfie! Before Ellen the most retweeted tweet belonged to President @BarackObama on election night in 2012.
#3 Humble Beginnings
This was Twitter’s first ever homepage…. yes really in fact, Twitter was almost called Twitch! Posts are limited to 140 characters because Twitter was born as an SMS phone service. The site opened to the public on July 15, 2006 and the rest was history!
#4 Most Followers
The user with the most followers on Twitter is Katy Perry with nearly 67 million followers!
#5 Vine
In 2013 Twitter acquired Vine, the video-sharing app for $30 million. A source says it’s short for Vignette, which is defined as “a short impressionistic scene.Vine videos are longer than six seconds and from the moment it was launched, Twitter’s video service has been known as a six-second platform.
#6 Twitter Stock Confusion
Twitter’s stock symbol is TWTR although some investors thought it was TWTRQ (Tweeter’s Home Entertainment penny stocks) The confusion led to TWTRQ jumping 2,200% on October 4th 2013! Twitter, recommends following three accounts for its stock information: @DickC, @Twitter and @TwitterIR.
#7 Twitter Popularity
Twitter has 288 million active monthly users and Facebook has 1.39 billion. It is estimated however that there are more than 2 billion registered Twitter accounts. Facebook tried buying Twitter twice, and each time Twitter pushed the “dislike” button!
#8 Twitter Worship
Twitter was planning to create a feature called “worship” in the early days. If you worshipped someone, you would get every single one of their messages. The idea was later ditched and of course we now have lists to keep track of our faves!
#9 Working At Twitter
Twitter has 3600 employees and 50% are engineers. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has a 89 percent approval rating by employees on rating site Glassdoor making them a pretty cool place to work!
#10 First Tweet
Want to see your first ever tweet? You can find your first ever tweet at First-Tweets.com and here’s mine… oh now I really am cringing… the memories!
So thank you Twitter for a great 10 years and for remaining my favourite social media network! Catch up with me @Charli_Says and remember to tweet my article!
