Who Owns Twitter

Introduction

Which social media platform comes to your mind if you just wanted to post an SMS msg for everyone to read? Or if you just wanted to post a small video? Twitter!! right? This social media platform is not like any of the other ones out there. It is very unique, very fast-paced, and just brings a whole new dimension to social interactions. It is a microblogging social media platform that people use to post messages for their followers to see. Twitter is not just a social media platform where people share their messages. It has become a platform to express your feelings, your ideas, and opinions to the world without any problem. Twitter has become a place for debates, raising issues, and promoting one’s views.

Twitter has almost all kinds of people coming from all backgrounds using it. The best part about this social media platform is you get to interact with people in all types of professions. You can interact with actors, sportsmen, doctors, lawyers, politicians, businessmen, industrialists, and many others. Anyone can share their views and opinions with others. It doesn’t matter if you are a billionaire or person doing a 9 to 5 job, Twitter gives you the same opportunity to share your views. In fact, it levels the playing field for everyone. These days you can see people openly counter the arguments of well known and powerful people if they post something that is wrong. Twitter became a platform for news media to get their stories from. A tweet from a politician can be the point of debate at 9 PM on a news channel.

But how did it happen? How did Twitter become the most influential social media platform in terms of narrative? Why do people prefer Twitter more to voice their opinions rather than other platforms? Who owns it? What makes Twitter so special? Let’s find out. 

What is Odeo?

This is what many people don’t know about Twitter. The parent company of Twitter is a company called Odeo. Odeo is a company that used to have a podcasting platform before creating Twitter. Interestingly this is the company where Kevin Systrom the man who owns Instagram, has worked as an intern before getting his first job. The idea of Twitter originated when the board members of Odeo had a brainstorming session one. Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, Briz Stone, Evan Williams, and Noah Glass.

The idea was proposed by Jack Dorsey who was still an undergraduate student at New York University at that time. Jack Dorsey is currently the CEO of Twitter and the majority shareholder of the company. He proposed the idea of creating an SMS service by which an individual can interact with a small group of people.  The code name for this project was “twttr”. They decided to use this name because the domain name twitter.com was not available as it was already in use. It took them six months to change the name to Twitter when they finally purchased the domain. They felt it was the perfect name for their platform as it meant chirps from birds and a short burst of inconsequential information.

Early days of Twitter

The first prototype of Twitter was developed by Jack Dorsey and Florian Weber. It was initially used by the employees of Odeo like an internal service. The full version of Twitter was released for public use on July 15, 2006. All of the founding fathers of Twitter formed Obvious corporation to acquire Odeo with all of its assets including Twitter even its investors and shareholders. During these days people in the company were not certain of what Twitter is about. They didn’t understand what was different on Twitter that could make it special. This was the time when Evan Williams was fired from the company. After that, Twitter became a separate company in 2007. 

The growth

It was the South by Southwest interactive conference which changed the fate of Twitter. SXSW is a company that organizes conferences, music festivals, film festivals, and other similar things. The idea of placing 60- inch plasma TVs in conference halls that only showed the Twitter messages has worked wonders for them. People were looking at the tweets of other members in the conference to follow them. Before this event, there used to be only 20,000 tweets per day on average. But during this event, the number increased to 60,000 tweets. Speakers and panelists present in the event praised it and all the reactions for Twitter were very positive. The staff of Twitter even received the Web Award prize of the festival.

NASA astronaut T.J. Creamer became the first person to post a Twitter message from space when he posted a tweet on January 22, 2010. There were dozens of tweets per day until November of that year. This helped Twitter to increase its popularity immensely. The period between 2007 and 2010 is when Twitter saw its rapid growth. In 2007 there used to be only 400,000 tweets per quarter which increased to 100 million in 2008. By 2010 Twitter users were posting 50 million tweets each day. This number almost tripled as users were posting more than 140 million tweets every single day.  Since then the popularity, reputation, and usage have only seen an increase.

What makes it special?

If you only used Twitter you will know how easy it is to use it. The microblogging platform is very simple and user friendly. Twitter does not have a large number of operations for its users to perform, this is exactly what makes it great. The platform is just for posting tweets and messages. It only allows people to use 280 characters in a tweet to say something. This number was only limited to 140 characters when Twitter started. This is great as the users don’t have to read a 1000+ word blog to know someone’s opinion. It forces you to be quick and simple in your tweets. Twitter is a platform where people share their messages during major sports events, elections, festivals, etc. The retweet and like options help the users to respond and support views and opinions they agree with. 

Conclusion

If you want to keep up with the views and everyday updates of your favorite celebrity then you should follow them on Twitter. Even though Twitter has its own downsides like haters and trolls they are very insignificant compared to the benefits of it. At most, it is only providing a platform for everyone to post their views even if the other person doesn’t like them.  This is a great thing as it promotes freedom of speech and expression for all. You can even counter an argument or judgement of an individual despite his power and social status using the retweet option. This provides you the same amount of audience to point out the flaw in a person’s judgement even if they are a celebrity or politician. It is no doubt that Twitter has revolutionized the way people debate and interact on social media platforms.

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