It’s Twitter’s seventh birthday, and the social network has two reasons to celebrate: It’s also reached its 200 million active user milestone.
Twitter has come a long way since Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder, published the first tweet “just setting up my Twitter” back in 2006. It started out as a microblogging site by Dorsey and co-founders, Florian Webb, Noah Glass, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone who could never have imagined the cultural, business, and societal impact that Twitter would have on Internet users today. There are some details surrounding the founding of Twitter (then Twttr) that are hotly contested. Some of its co-founders aren’t even recognized for their role with building out the foundation of Twitter, back when it was just a side project at once doomed and now defunct podcasting company Odeo. If you want to know what really may have gone down in its dark history, you can check out Twitter’s history as retold by Business Insider.
Regardless, Twitter is now boasting some big user numbers, a 60 million user bump since last year. Now 400 million tweets are being sent per day. Good luck to the Library of Congress keeping up with the archival of these tweets.
This could be Twitter’s last birthday as an independent company, as IPO rumors continue to surround the platform. This is just speculation however but it would mark the beginning of a new and very public company that’s often kept itself shrouded in secrecy. It’s been suggested Twitter would receive as high as a $10 billion valuation.
But that’s getting ahead of ourselves – to celebrate today, the social network is reminding us of its milestones over the years beginning with its birth up to the Twitter that we’ve come to know today. You might learn a few things about Twitter like the fact that the first hashtags and retweets were used in 2007, and the first Oprah tweet: “HI TWITTERS. THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21ST CENTURY,” posted back in 2009. Then there was the first tweet sent from space in the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T.J. Creamer in 2010.
If you want a blast from the past, you might want to check out the haters seven years ago who first read about Twttr in TechCrunch and didn’t really have any positive things to say about the then-project.
Check out the video below.
