Twitter is a relatively new social
network which is growing to be the biggest social network in the world second
to Facebook. Twitter has 500,000,000 users and it lets you send a 'tweet' which
can contain a message of up to 140 Characters. It also has facilities to let
you share pictures and videos with the group of people that follow you.
Twitter was founded on 21 March 2006
by 4 people. It goes back to the podcasting service Odeo which lets you send
podcasts to users. After this service began to fail the employees of this
service were allowed to take part in a hackathon where they were allowed to
spend a whole day working coming up with projects and new ideas. Jack Dorsey,
Noah Glass, Evan Williams and Biz Stone had collectively came up with the idea
of a service called Twittr. This idea began to grow and it was based around
users sending a SMS to the website. Some of the Odeo users became addicted to
the service and began racking up huge phone bills. Odeo had faith in this new
service and agreed to pay the phone bills for these employees.
In October 2006 Odeo was failing due
to iTunes announcing that their iPods would have a podcast service and this
paired with Twittr slowly growing left Investors worried. Evan Williams, who
was already rich due to selling blogging site Blogger to Google, offered to buy
out the owners of Odeo by saying that he felt sorry for them and he wanted to
help them out. These investors now say that Williams deceived them and that
they were betrayed. As soon as Williams acquired Odeo he changed the name to
Obvious Corporation. The name of Twittr
was then changed to Twitter.
Many of the previous employees say
Noah Glass was the person that was really pushing the idea of Twitter and was
apparently working harder than anyone to get Twitter going. This is why it was
a huge shock that Williams fired Noah Glass when he acquired Odeo, who owned
Twitter. It is rumoured that he did this because he really spotted the
potential of Twitter and he wanted the success to himself. Noah Glass still has
a Twitter profile in which he states in his Biography "I started
this" and according to many Odeo employees he is right.
Williams then took Twitter and broke
it off from Odeo to make it its own company. It was at this point that Noah
Glass received a share of the money for Twitter although the exact figure is
not known. Glass still wasn't satisfied and said he felt betrayed and pushed
out by his friends, referring to Williams. The other inventors Jack Dorsey and
Biz Stone remained at the company although they have recently distanced
themselves from it. Biz Stone is described as a co-founder of Twitter in which
he would occasionally help the other 3 out but now he doesn't spend any time at
the Twitter HQ. Dorsey still works at Twitter and he is also credited as a
co-founder of Twitter.
As Twitter grew investors have come
out to vent their frustrations at being pushed out of Odeo by Williams. Who can
blame them though? Recent statistics value Twitter at $8.6 Billion and with the
investors collectively receiving an estimated $25 Million you can see why they
feel robbed. Twitters revenue is always increasing as it now offers advertising to businesses by making them
a trending topic. The trending topics are meant to be about what most people
are talking about but now some are edited to be there by Twitter. It is a great
way for businesses to advertise with a potential reach of 500 million users.
Twitter is still growing and is constantly breaking its own records. When
Michael Jackson died Twitter broke its own record of number of tweets as it
recorded 100,000 tweets per hour with the words Michael Jackson in them.
Many users find Twitter addictive and
with a new recent layout it is competing with Facebook. So over the next few
years competition between the two is likely to increase and this could cause a
better social network or both could flop.
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