Twitter to celebrate 7th birthday with 200m users
The first ever tweet was sent in San Francisco, California, by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey on Mar 21, 2006.
Today, there are 200m users worldwide, according to Twitter.
Kate Bussmann, a journalist and author, who wrote A Twitter Year: 365 Days In 140 Characters, said: “It’s no understatement to say, in seven short years, Twitter has changed the way the world communicates.
“It’s given us all the power to get our voice heard and to connect easily and instantly with other people who care about the same things we do — whether that’s politics or sport, Justin Bieber or Downton Abbey.
“It’s made the world smaller.”
Twitter allows users to post messages online containing 140 characters or less, though 40% of users do not tweet but use the platform to follow other users.
The user with the most followers is Justin Bieber; the Canadian pop star has 36.2m followers. He is followed by three more pop stars — Lady Gaga (35.1m), Katy Perry (33.8m), and Rihanna (28.8m) — and US president Barack Obama (28.5m).
Niall Horan, from boy band One Direction, is the most-followed Irish tweeter. The Mullingar native’s 10.4m followers also make him the 37th most popular tweeter, one place above billionaire Bill Gates.
The Dalai Lama is the most followed religious leader, his 6.5m followers putting him in 86th place,
Hootsuite, a social media management company, follows more than 1m accounts, the most of any user. The most prolific tweeter is @Yougakduan_00, a Japanese girl who posted a mind-boggling 36.4m tweets before Twitter suspended her account.
Ten facts about Twitter, the social networking tool that is celebrating its seventh birthday
*400 million Tweets are sent daily.
* It took three years, two months and one day for the first billion Tweets to be sent on the platform. The same number are now sent every two-and-a-half days.
*The hashtag feature, first proposed by a user, first appeared on Twitter in Aug 2007.
*British Twitter users are very mobile – 80% of users are active on mobile, compared to 60% globally.
*The re-tweet feature was launched in August 2009, more than three years after the platform was founded.
*The most re-tweeted Tweet to date was this message from US President Barack Obama (pictured): “Four more years”, after he won the US presidential election on Nov 6, 2012. It was retweeted more than 811,000 times.
*On March 25, 2012, James Cameron sent a Tweet from the ocean’s deepest point, the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific.
*The first Tweet was sent in San Francisco, California, by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006.
*Today there are 200m users worldwide, nearly 2m accounts based in Ireland, and 10m active users in Britain.
*Twitter was localised in right-to-left languages Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu, increasing the number of localised languages to 28, on March 6, 2012.
