July 15 – Happy Birthday, Twitter!

Posted on July 15, 2016

When I look for things to write about here, I usually see long, depressing lists of wars, battles, coups, massacres, and other sorts of violence that happened on the date I'm writing about. Scattered among all that depressing stuff, here and there, are inventions.

I tend to focus on the positive, so: inventions! Innovations! Creativity!

On this date in 2006, Twitter was introduced to the public for the first time.

When Twitter was being created as a way for people to send and read short messages to one another, it wasn't clear how people were going to use it. Most called it a social network, like Facebook, because people could follow friends and family, and vice versa; people could also follow stars (probably NOT vice versa!). But actually it quickly evolved to be more of an information network.

At a 2007 conference, Twitter people placed 60-inch screens in the conference hallways and streamed Twitter messages. Because of this, speakers and panelists mentioned Twitter, and conference-goers realized that they could keep tabs on each other via tweets. The number of tweets per day tripled during the event, and a LOT of enthusiasts were created.

Since then, of course, the number of Twitter users and tweets has increased hugely – and quickly. Twitter is now used by about 320 million people, these days, resulting in these sorts of numbers:

On average, around 6,000 tweets per second

About 350,000 tweets per minute

About 500,000,000 tweets per day

About 200,000,000,000 tweets per year

Wow!

Twitter: one more reason to be on your
phone rather than talking, watching,
listening...?

People use Twitter especially during big-time events. Disasters, extreme weather, elections, exciting or important soccer or basketball games...keep up with all of that with Twitter!

Here are some things to learn about Twitter – just explore around Twitter, Google the terms, ask a friend, or even tweet a question: