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Twitter history
Twitter company history timeline
The full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006.
On the one hand, by early as the summer of 2006, there was already plenty of evidence that some users found Twitter impossibly addictive.
Interest in the platform sharply increased after it was presented at the South by Southwest music and technology conference in Austin, Texas, in March 2007.
June 2007 - Twitter holds its first round of funding, raising $5 million and receiving a valuation of $20 million.
August 2007 - The hashtag "#" makes its debut, supposedly started by user Chris Messina.
October 2008 - With frustration over unaddressed server failures and the encouragement of Evan Williams, Twitter's shareholders remove Dorsey as CEO, replacing him with Williams.
As noted on Compete.com, Twitter moved up to the third-highest-ranking social networking site in January 2009 from its previous rank of twenty-second.
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.
April 2009 - Twitter executives Evan Williams and Biz Stone are listed under Time's 100 most influential people in the world.
Twitter truly established itself as an emerging outlet for the dissemination of information during the events surrounding the Iranian presidential election in June 2009.
In June of 2009, Twitter is rumored to have e-commerce plans and opens firehose access to Google and Bing.
When American singer Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, Twitter servers crashed after users were updating their status to include the words "Michael Jackson" at a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour.
Following the earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010, Twitter reaffirmed its role as a powerful tool for the dissemination of information.
The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010.
In February 2010, Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day.
Twitter acquired application developer Atebits on April 11, 2010.
From September through October 2010, the company began rolling out "New Twitter", an entirely revamped edition of twitter.com.
In March 2011, five years after Twttr was born, Howard Stern had Christopher "Biz" Stone on his show.
On April 5, 2011, Twitter tested a new homepage and phased out the "Old Twitter". However, a glitch came about after the page was launched, so the previous "retro" homepage was still in use until the issues were resolved; the new homepage was reintroduced on April 20.
June 2011 - Cofounder Biz Stone announces departure from his day-to-day role at Twitter.
July 2011 - The White House hosts a Twitter town hall with President Barack Obama and Jack Dorsey as moderator.
Twitter hit 100 million monthly active users in September 2011.
Prior to joining Twitter in 2011, Vijaya was senior director, legal at Juniper Networks; previously, for nearly a decade she worked at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
Williams fired Glass, who was silent about his part in Twitter's startup until 2011.
On February 21, 2012, it was announced that Twitter and Yandex agreed to a partnership.
On March 21, 2012, Twitter celebrated its sixth birthday while also announcing that it had 140 million users and 340 million tweets per day.
In April 2012, Twitter announced that it was opening an office in Detroit, with the aim of working with automotive brands and advertising agencies.
On June 5, 2012, a modified logo was unveiled through the company blog, removing the text to showcase the slightly redesigned bird as the sole symbol of Twitter.
In 2012 Stone and Ben Finkel began work on a new venture, Jelly, a search app in which users posted questions that were answered by others in their social network.
Twitter released Vine as a standalone app that allows users to create and share six-second looping video clips on January 24, 2013.
On April 18, 2013, Twitter launched a music app called Twitter Music for the iPhone.
On August 28, 2013, Twitter acquired Trendrr, followed by the acquisition of MoPub on September 9, 2013.
As of September 2013, the company's data showed that 200 million users sent over 400 million tweets daily, with nearly 60% of tweets sent from mobile devices.
In 2013, the platform's dominant spot came under fire with Instagram's introduction of the 15-second video clip.
In April 2014, Twitter underwent a redesign that made the site resemble Facebook somewhat, with profile picture and biography in a column left to the timeline, and a full-width header image with parallax scrolling effect.
On June 19, 2014, Twitter announced that it had reached an undisclosed deal to buy SnappyTV, a service that helps edit and share video from television broadcasts.
In July 2014, Twitter announced that it intended to buy a young company called CardSpring for an undisclosed sum.
On July 31, 2014, Twitter announced that it had acquired a small password-security startup called Mitro.
On October 29, 2014, Twitter announced a new partnership with IBM. The partnership was intended to help businesses use Twitter data to understand their customers, businesses and other trends.
November 2014 - Twitter announces an instant timeline.
December 2014 - Twitter releases new anti-harassment tools and announces that more effort will be put toward curbing online abuse.
On March 13, 2015, Twitter announced its acquisition of Periscope, an app that allows live streaming of video.
Dorsey returned as CEO in October 2015.
Twitter added a new feature, Moments, in October 2015, which allowed users and the service itself to create curated thematic collections of tweets and other content.
In 2015, this model generated around $400 million in revenue.
Later in the year it became apparent that growth had slowed, according to Fortune, Business Insider, Marketing Land and other news websites including Quartz (in 2016). In June 2016, Twitter acquired an artificial intelligence startup called Magic Pony for $150 million.
Following changes of leadership, social media talent agencies drafted and discarded plans for fusing Twitter and Vine, and a failed attempt at selling the platform, Twitter shut down Vine in October of 2016.
Prior to joining the company in 2016, she was executive vice president of global advertising and marketing and digital partnerships at American Express.
The "machine learning algorithms"—introduced by Twitter in 2016—personalized 99% of users' feeds by displaying Tweets—even older Tweets and Retweets from accounts the user had not directly followed—but that the algorithm had "deemed relevant" to the users' past preferences.
The character limit of a tweet was increased from 140 to 280 characters in 2017.
Twitter finally became profitable in the last quarter of 2017, when it had 330 million monthly users.
His books included Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content (2002), Who Let the Blogs Out?: A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs (2004), and Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind (2014). It launched two years later and was sold to Pinterest in 2017.
Since May 2018, tweet replies deemed by an artificial intelligence to be detractive from conversation are initially hidden, and only loaded through actuating a Show more replies button at the bottom.
September 2018 - Jack Dorsey testifies before the United States senate alongside Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
November 2018 - Twitter expands from 140 to 280-word count.
Prior to joining Twitter in 2018, Dalana was vice president of Total Rewards for Electronic Arts, Inc.
June 2019 - Twitter reveals data showing thousands of fake accounts linked to foreign governments like Iran and Russia.
In October 2019, the tweet history of the Fortnite video game's account was resurrected after appearing deleted during a marketing campaign.
She joined Twitter in 2019 as the revenue durability strategy and operations lead.
Early in 2019 Twitter switched from tracking monthly users to “monetizable daily active users,” the number of users in a day who were exposed to ads.
In 2019, Twitter redesigned its user interface yet again.
The Twitter research team that began work on this effort was set up in late 2019.
In November 2020, Twitter announced that it would develop a social audio feature on its platform.
Twitter saw somewhat dramatic growth in 2020, possibly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
On January 26, 2021, Twitter acquired Revue, an email newsletter service to compete with platforms like Substack.
On February 25, 2021, Twitter announced Super Follows, a subscription service allowing content creators to receive payments for their content.
In March 2021, Twitter started beta testing Spaces for Android users.
In April 2021, Twitter announced that it was establishing its African headquarters in Ghana.
In May 2021 Twitter introduced Spaces, in which accounts with more than 600 followers could host live audio conversations.
On May 3, 2021, Twitter Spaces released globally.
In June 2021, Twitter announced the beta rollout of its Super Follows feature.
The deal was first announced in October 2021, and the selling price was reported at $1.05 billion.
In November 2021 Dorsey stepped down as CEO again and was replaced by chief technology officer Parag Agrawal.
As of late 2021, the service had 217 million monetizable daily active users.
In January 2022, Twitter finalized the sale of MoPub to AppLovin.
In 2022 Twitter announced that it was to be purchased by South African-born American entrepreneur Elon Musk for about $44 billion.
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Zippia gives an in-depth look into the details of Twitter, including salaries, political affiliations, employee data, and more, in order to inform job seekers about Twitter. The employee data is based on information from people who have self-reported their past or current employments at Twitter. The data on this page is also based on data sources collected from public and open data sources on the Internet and other locations, as well as proprietary data we licensed from other companies. Sources of data may include, but are not limited to, the BLS, company filings, estimates based on those filings, H1B filings, and other public and private datasets. While we have made attempts to ensure that the information displayed are correct, Zippia is not responsible for any errors or omissions or for the results obtained from the use of this information. None of the information on this page has been provided or approved by Twitter. The data presented on this page does not represent the view of Twitter and its employees or that of Zippia.
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