Anam, Raven A.

Entrepreneurship - 12

Twitter, online microblogging service for

distributing short messages among groups of recipients via personal
computer or mobile telephone. Twitter incorporates aspects of social
networking Web sites, such as Myspace and Facebook, with instant
messaging technologies to create networks of users who can communicate
throughout the day with brief messages, or “tweets.” A user types a tweet
via mobile phone keypad or computer and sends it to Twitter’s server,
which relays it to a list of other users (known as followers) who have
signed up to receive the sender’s tweets by either text message to their
mobile phones or by instant message to their personal computers. In
addition, users can elect to track specific topics, creating
a dialogue of sorts and pushing the number of followers in a given
Twitter feed into the millions. Tweets may be on any subject, ranging
from jokes to news to dinner plans, but they cannot exceed 140 characters.
The History Of Twitter
Twitter was built using Ruby on Rails, a specialized Web-application
framework for the Ruby computer programming language. Its interface
allows open adaptation and integration with other online services. The
service was designed in 2006 by Evan Williams and Biz Stone, each of
whom worked at Google before leaving to launch the podcasting venture
Odeo. Williams, who had previously created the popular Web authoring
tool Blogger, began experimenting with one of Odeo’s side projects—a
short message service (SMS) then called Twttr. Seeing a future for the
product, Williams bought out Odeo and started Obvious Corp. to further
develop it. Engineer Jack Dorsey joined the management team, and the
completed version of Twitter debuted at the South by Southwest music
conference in Austin, Texas, in March 2007. The following month Twitter,
Inc., was created as a corporate entity, thanks to an infusion of venture
capital.
From its inception Twitter was primarily a free SMS with a social
networking element. As such, it lacked the clear revenue stream that one
could find on sites that derived income from banner advertising or
membership fees. With the number of unique visitors increasing some 1,300
percent in 2009, it was obvious that Twitter was more than
a niche curiosity. However, in a year that saw the social
networking juggernaut Facebook turn a profit for only the first time,
it was not clear whether Twitter could achieve financial independence
from its venture capital investors. In April 2010 Twitter unveiled
“Promoted Tweets”—advertisements that would appear in search results—as
its intended primary revenue source.

From Novelty To News Source

Twitter’s social networking roots were obvious in April 2009, when

actor Ashton Kutcher emerged as the victor in a race with CNN to become
the first Twitterer to collect more than a million followers. While
celebrity “e-watching” remained a significant draw to the service,
businesses soon began sending tweets about promotions and events, and
political campaigns discovered the value of Twitter as a communication
tool. In the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Barack Obama dominated his
opponent, John McCain, in the social media sphere, amassing almost four
times as many Myspace friends and more than 20 times as many Twitter
followers. This development virtually ensured that future candidates
would include a social networking presence as part of their media
strategies.

Perhaps the most noteworthy step in the evolution of Twitter, though,

was its increased use as a tool for amateur journalists. Twitter
transformed from something that was regarded as an idle hobby for an
increasingly wired world into an up-to-the-second news source
that transcended political borders. On January 15, 2009, a tweet by
commuter ferry passenger Janis Krums broke the story of the successful
water landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in New York
City. A hastily snapped camera phone image of passengers disembarking
the half-submerged aircraft was uploaded to Twitpic.com, a photo-hosting
service for Twitter users; the site promptly crashed as thousands of
Twitterers attempted to view it at once.
Twitter truly established itself as an emerging outlet for the
dissemination of information during the events surrounding the Iranian
presidential election in June 2009. As state media sources reported that
Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had secured an easy victory, supporters of
opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi took to the streets in a series
of demonstrations that eventually provoked a crackdown by the government,
in which some demonstrators were injured or killed. The topic
#IranElection became one of the most followed on Twitter, as Mousavi
supporters coordinated protests and posted live updates of events
throughout the Iranian capital. On June 15, three days after the
election, Twitter delayed a 90-minute maintenance period at the request
of the U.S. State Department, rescheduling it for 1:30 AMTehrān time so
as not to interfere with the flow of information within and from Iran.
The following day, foreign journalists were banned from covering
opposition rallies, and Twitter, along with other social networking
sites, filled the void left by the traditional media. Government security
officers tried to stanch the flow of information by blocking individual
Twitterers, while opposition supporters urged #IranElection followers to
change their profile settings to the Tehrān time zone in an attempt to
overwhelm government filters. Although the protests did not result in a
change in the election results or a new election, the tweets of de facto
journalists showed the potential of nontraditional media
to circumvent government censorship.
Having demonstrated its versatility as a high-tech newswire, Twitter
drew the attention of those who would prefer to see certain information
suppressed. In August 2009 a Georgian economics professor whose tweets
recounted the days leading up to the 2008 military conflict between
Russia and Georgia was the target of a massive denial-of-service
attack that knocked out the entire site for hours. Millions of users
attempted to log into Twitter only to be greeted by the
service’s iconic “fail whale”—the image of a cartoon whale being hoisted
into the air by a flock of birds, signaling a site outage.
Following the earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010, Twitter
reaffirmed its role as a powerful tool for the dissemination of
information. Additionally, it became an effective fund-raising platform,
when the Red Cross launched a mobile giving campaign that surpassed all
expectations. High-profile users tweeted about the drive to help victims
of the earthquake, and many of their followers tweeted and re-tweeted
the message, helping the Red Cross raise more than $8 million
through text messaging within 48 hours of the quake.
In September 2013 Twitter filed to become a public company. (It announced
the news to the public in a tweet.) Its initial public offering (IPO)
in November raised $1.8 billion, giving it a market value of $31 billion.

Since 2006 the progression of Twitter has been enormous. Twitter was
introduced before the first iPhone was released and Facebook has just
started to become popular. In 2007 Twitter had it first major growth
spurt with the statistics increase from an average of 20,000 tweets per
day to 60,000. Since then it has just increased more and more. In 2013
it was measured that there were over 645,000,000 users and an average
of 58,000,000 per day.

Twitter is now in the top 10 most visited sites on the Internet. In 2013
it is estimated that $405,500,00 worth of advertising revenue was raised
and it is estimated to be worth over $25 billion dollars.