Twitter Celebrates It’s 7th Birthday: A Retrospective

Today (March 21st 2013) marks the seventh birthday of Internet giant Twitter. Notably on Wednesday chancellor George Osborne signed up to the service. As it currently stands Twitter has 200 million worldwide users, sending out approximately 400 million tweets a day, a truly mindboggling amount of information every single day. Such widespread adoption and acceptance makes Twitter a cornerstone of the internet and an interesting point of study.

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched as a social networking site in July. The idea started during an Odeo (a podcasting company) brainstorming session, Dorsey suggested using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. A prototype service was rolled out for company employees and a full version was released to the public on July 15th 2006. Twitter usage increased markedly after a positive reception at the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference.

Because of it’s substantial Internet presence Twitter has a variety of usages beyond the standard conversational buzz. It is now commonplace for celebrities and politicians to maintain a Twitter account (either personally or via a publicist). Notable examples include Barack Obama and David Cameron. Popular British celebrities include examples such as Stephan Fry and Jonathan Ross, noted for engaging with their fans.

Further to this various special interest groups have used twitter as a platform for their campaign. One notable example that has gathered support and garnered aggressive backlash is “No More Page 3” (@Nomorepage3). Started by Lucy Holmes in August 2012 aims to remove the Page 3 girl feature from The Sun newspaper. So far the campaign has 13,595 followers and an estimated 12,925 tweets (correct at the time of writing). Lucy has repeatedly recommended Twitter as a method of getting the message across.

Twitter is also considered to have a commercial aspect, a variety of companies including the company I work for (www.Phonestar.co.uk) have a twitter account (https://twitter.com/PhoneStarTweets) that they can use to engage with their clients and advertise special offers. It gives consumers at any level a way to communicate with previously faceless corporate giants allowing for previously unheard of levels of customer service.

So what does the future hold for Twitter? Currently there is a suggestion that the company will go public this year with an estimated worth of $11billion. Parallel to this there have been controversies with the growth of Twitter; subjects such as cyber-bullying and privacy concerns seem to go hand in hand. Only the other day the United Kingdom budget was published via Twitter before George Osborne gave his statement. Recently there has been discussion over the fact Twitter are not obligated to aid Police enquiries. As it stands Twitter still holds a considerable amount of potential and a remarkable amount of influence