With Twitter accepting Elon Musk¡¯s $44 billion offer yesterday, a new era is about to begin for the social media platform after 16 years of inception. Since it was founded in the year 2006, Twitter has witnessed a rollercoaster ride full of landmark decisions and some controversies.
So let's look back at some of the highlights, hiccups and controversies that have surrounded twitter in the past 16 years of its existence.
Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter Inc. in 2006?when he launched it along with Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass.
Dorsey was the Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Then in October 2008, Williams took over as CEO, while Dorsey became chairman of the board. On March 28, 2011, Dorsey returned to Twitter as executive chairman after Dick Costolo replaced Evan Williams as CEO. Surprisingly, in June 2015, Costolo announced his resignation as CEO, effective July 1, 2015. Dorsey assumed the post of interim CEO upon Costolo's departure and was named permanent CEO on October 5, 2015.
It was in March 2006 when Jack Dorsey made the first tweet to launch Twitter.
The Tweet says-¡±just setting up my twttr¡±. This tweet was also auctioned as an NFT recently.
On December 17, 2009, Twitter was attacked and hacked, with users attempting to post their pearls of wisdom and obligatory breakfast food observations meeting an ominous greeting instead. A group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army took credit for the Twitter hack, which was later discovered to be a DNS exploit designed to redirect users from Twitter.com to a page with this message: "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army. The U.S.A. think they control and manage the internet by their access, but they don't, we control and manage the Internet by our power, so do not try to stimulation the Iranian peoples to... Now which country in embargo list? Iran? USA? We push them in embargo list. Take care."?
The hack, careful sabotage of the server that links the Twitter domain name to an IP address, changed Twitter's DNS records to an IP address that lead to the Iranian Cyber Army message page.
In 2009, Twitter launched the blue ¡®verified¡¯ tick to protect well-known individuals, companies, and public agencies against impersonation.
It is believed that hashtags weren¡¯t actually Twitter¡¯s invention, but the company caught on to the way people were using them to group tweets around specific events and topics. In July 2009, it made hashtags automatically hyperlinked, so that people could click on a hashtag to see other tweets using it.
Over time, that small feature has become increasingly important and popular on Twitter!
In 2009, Twitter had started rolling out its retweet button, initially to a ¡°very small percentage of accounts¡±, suggesting that it ¡°makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy¡±. Since then, it¡¯s become a familiar part of the platform.
In 2010, twitter started on the road to making money by beginning promoted tweets. Brands started paying to have their tweets shown at the top of search results pages.
And by next year, Twitter started putting promoted tweets into people¡¯s main streams, and it has since launched other kinds of ads too: Promoted Accounts and Promoted Trends for example.?
Over the years, Twitter has gone through several redesigns in its history. But #NewTwitter has been one of the most protracted ones. It was revealed in September 2010?and rolled out to users over the next year.
The key change here was a two-pane design, with videos and photos now viewable on Twitter. It also introduced features like related content and mini-profiles.
Officially known as Quickbar, not many may remember the #DickBar? Twitter¡¯s executive chairman Costolo was the inspiration for the nickname, coined by influential tech blogger John Gruber as ¡°Dick-Bar¡±.
This came with a storm, with users protesting loudly at the addition of a floating bar at the top of the tweet stream in Twitter¡¯s iPhone app, showing trending topics ¨C including promoted ones. It was annoying and intrusive, especially because it couldn¡¯t be turned off.
By the end of that month, Twitter had removed the Quickbar feature. ¡°After testing a feature and evaluating its merits, if we learn it doesn¡¯t improve the user experience or serve our mission, we¡¯ll remove that feature,¡± explained the company.
Its widely believed that Twitter #Music was a high-profile flop. It was pitched by Twitter as ¡°a way to surface songs people are tweeting about¡± and thus help people discover new artists and music.
It launched as a website and iOS app, but by October that year rumours were already flying of its imminent demise, as it didn¡¯t catch on. By April 2014, it was shut down.
the ability to share and view animated GIFs on Twitter¡¯s website, Android and iPhone apps began in 2014.
As the name suggests, this new feature helped Twitter users recollect whatever they might have missed when they were away from Twitter, based on what/whom they followed, liked tweets etc.
This new feature of the like button and heart symbol replaced the favourite button and star symbol which existed until Nov 2015.
In October 2016, Twitter laid off roughly 9% of its workforce, leading to the elimination of an estimated 350 jobs.
It was nearly 12 years after its inception that Twitter finally increased the character count for texts from 140 to 280 for users.
After holding the position since 2015, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stepped down from the position immediately on November 29, 2021.?
His last tweet as CEO of Twitter was-I Love Twitter.
Upon his resignation, Jack Dorsey handed over and nominated Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal as the new CEO, who immediately replaced Dorsey after his resignation.
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