Social Media. It is something which didn't even exist 15 years ago. And now no one can imagine their life without some sort of social media platform. Every one of us using some of the other social media platforms and while you are reading this, it is a proven fact that this blog post reached you via some sort of social media involvement only. It so important that if I ever try to circumvent the usage of social media, I would only be able to write my blog posts and wouldn't be able to circulate them to my audience. It has become so important that during the earlier days the news articles were keeping in mind the events which took place in the actual world and then they became a news piece, and now, everything that happens on the social media could anytime become a part of the news, be it a trend, or a post, or a feud between some of your film stars.
There are many platforms that people use and in today's market, we have a lot of options on what we want to use. People generally use social media which suits their choice or the content which they think is easily digestible for them. For example, some people are generally interested in what happens in their friend circle and how their 'near and dear' are doing, use Facebook. Some people are more inclined towards sharing photographs and use Instagram as a great photo-sharing platform. While some people like to follow their favorite politicians, actors, and artists on a micro-blogging website and Twitter gives them this functionality.
Today we are going to talk about Twitter and how it came into existence, this day, 14 years ago. Who knew back then that this project would explode in popularity and become the world's one of the most used social media platforms.
Back in 2006, a San Francisco based podcasting company, Odeo was working on a platform where users can upload and view podcasts. This project was headed by Evan Williams, who was the founder of the very popular diary publishing platform, Blogger. Evan sold Blogger to Google worth millions of dollars and established his own company, 'Odeo' with Noah Glass. The idea behind using Odea went obsolete very quickly when Apple launched iTunes which had a great feature of podcasts.
The team initially founded 'twttr' and the idea behind founding it was to let people share their status with their friends. The first-ever tweet sent from the website was 'just setting up twttr'.
'Twttr' was launched for the public in July 2006 and it was still a side project of Evan's 'Odeo'. They later posed a restriction on the users to only post content which limits to 140-characters. This limit was based on the more conventional Short Messaging Services which was 160-characters during the time. It was later named to 'Twitter' and it was then regarding as a micro-blogging website.
The use of Twitter then exploded and it quickly grew in size. More than 60,000 tweets were being sent daily just after 9 months from the day it was launched for the public. The company then grew the number of employees it had and it finally went public in November 2013. The time it went public, it was valued at around $31 Billion.
Nowadays, people use twitter to stay updated with the events which are happening around the world. Many famous people, such as world leaders, politicians, film stars, sports personalities, etc. are all on Twitter and people use the platform to get their daily dose of entertainment and current affairs. Twitter is also a great source to get to know what is trending around the world with the help of the hashtags. Hashtags can be used along with the tweets a user sends with his account and the more such usages occur, the more trending a hashtag becomes. Hashtags help to give a very decent idea of what is trending around the world. Hashtags played a very important role during the very recent Black Civil Rights protests around the world. The hashtag BlackLivesMatter was trending around the world and it played a very important role the strengthening the movement.
Twitter is also used to announce important policy changes by the government and people and political parties also use the platform to oppose their opponents.
As the number of internet users is rising around the world, the usage of common platforms is sure to go up in the future. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have immense popularity among their users and are growing more in terms of the services they offer and the user base they have. As I said, who knew, that a side project by Odeo would grow so much in popularity. I am pleased to have Twitter as a great source of information and current affairs.