 "A 3D printed Twitter logo is seen in this illustration picture made in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo: Reuters")
Micro-blogging site Twitter turns 10 on Monday.
With the hashtag "LoveTwitter" trending and inviting people to celebrate Twitter's first decade, Twitter's official handle thanked all its users for "10 incredible years".
The site's official blog kicked off the celebration on Monday afternoon and said: "On March 21, ten years ago, it began with a single Tweet. Since then, every moment of every day, people connect about the things they care about most — all over the world."
The Tweet in question, posted by founder Jack Dorsey, said "just setting up my twttr" on March 21, 2006.
Of course, since then, Twitter has come a long way. From amassing 300 million users to going public.
Starting in ???????? on 3/21 and moving across the ????, we thank you for 10 incredible years.
— Twitter (@twitter) March 20, 2016
Love, Twitter#LoveTwitterhttps://t.co/pH4WWdgK6q
just setting up my twttr
— Jack (@jack) March 21, 2006
User growth:
According to online statistics portal Statista, as of the fourth quarter of 2015, the micro-blogging service averaged at 305 million monthly active users.
In the beginning of 2015, India alone had 22.2 million users on Twitter. According to a 2015 report by the Huffingtonpost, Twitter clocked double digit growth in India with the site accounting for 17% of the total social network users in one of the world's largest Internet market. The article cited a report by market research firm eMarketer and said that India was only second to Japan (26 million) in terms of the size of its Twitter population.
However, according to a New York Times report, in February this year, after many quarters of slowing user growth, Twitter said its monthly visitors in the fourth quarter totalled 320 million. The figure had not budged from the one the company reported in the previous quarter.
Over the years the social networking site took its simple theory - express yourself in 140 characters or fewer - and took the cyber, and real, world by storm.
Twitter revolution:
Twitter's role was hailed in the Arab Spring, a series of democratic uprisings that spread across the Arab world in 2011, and it was credited by many as a tool for new-age revolution.
According to a 2012 report published on Journalism.org, the United States Institute of Peace published a report in July of 2012 in which the authors said that while social media like Twitter had not been the cause for the Arab Spring, it had served as a "megaphone" which allowed "communicating to the rest of the world what was happening on the ground during the uprisings".
The study, based on the content analysis of bit.ly links – or short URLs – from the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain, showed that social media like Twitter, by the nature of bit.ly links, were instrumental in getting news out to the world as these movements erupted and grew.
Saying 'I do' in 140 characters or less:
Twitter, over the years, must have seen many firsts. The first Twitter marriage proposal, for instance.
@stefsull - ok. for the rest of the twitter-universe (and this is a first, folks) - WILL YOU MARRY ME?
— Greg Rewis (@garazi) March 3, 2008
According to BBC, American Greg Rewis became the first person to ask his girlfriend to marry him over Twitter. The tweet, published in 2008, read: "@stefsull - ok. for the rest of the twitter-universe (and this is a first, folks) - WILL YOU MARRY ME?"
Speaking to BBC, Rewis said, ""It was quite a shock when I found out that this was the first proposal on Twitter. Had we known it was the first time, we would have made it more impressive. I would have planned everything way better."
Rise of the Trolls:
With all things good, there is always a catch.
Enter the "troll" and the online slandering and abuses which Twitter users, especially public personalities, have to face.
While no numbers or concrete data are available, the problem became serious enough for Twitter to take note and act.
According to The Verge, then Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, in a 2015 internal memo, said, "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years." Costolo added, "It's no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day."
The very same year, Twitter introduced measures to curb trolling and make it easier for user to report harassment or abuse and block users.
The new political battlefield:
Politicians, in India and the world over, latched on to the the importance of Twitter. In an age of dwindling attention spans, this was the perfect way to reach a much larger base, hit out at an opponent, or just be heard on any topic — bypassing traditional media channels.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for his part, is an avid Twitter user. Currently, PM Modi has 18.7 million Twitter followers.
(Photo: Twitter)
The Twitter-scape has also seen political fights break out all through last year. Controversial BJP leader and Union Minister of State for Micro Small and Medium Enterprises Giriraj Singh, for example, went on to call Bihar politician Lalu Yadav "senile" as he made his opinion on consuming beef heard in the run-up to the Bihar Assembly polls.
Another Indian leader who has taken well to Twitter and uses it often for political messaging is Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. From allegations against the Modi government to claiming that the CBI raided his office in order to aide in a cover up, Kejriwal has often used the platform to vent and to air his opinion.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor was one of the first Indian leaders to take to Twitter and for a while was the most followed among the lot. Currently, Tharoor's verified account has 3.99 million followers.
US President Barack Obama joined the party a bit late when he officially announced that he would be tweeting under the official handle "@POTUS" in May last year.
“Hello, Twitter! It's Barack. Really! Six years in, they're finally giving me my own account,” Obama tweeted in his first posting.
The "@POTUS" handle currently has 6.82 million followers, while Obama's verified personal account has 71.4 million followers.
There are 65 verified world leaders active on Twitter currently, according to a public list of verified accounts compiled by Twitter.
Going after ISIS:
Baffled by a severe crackdown on its social media accounts in recent past, a self-styled hacking division of terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) issued a video, in February this year, that threatened Facebook and Twitter CEOs with dire consequences if the social media platforms kept taking down pro-ISIS accounts.
"To Mark and Jack, founders of Twitter and Facebook and to their Crusader government. You announce daily that you suspended many of your accounts, and to you we say: Is that all you can do? You are not in our league," read a banner at the end of the video.
In a bid to curb promotion of extremists ideologies and ISIS propaganda online, Twitter, for its part, recently announced that it had suspended over 125,000 accounts for threatening or promoting terrorist acts, primarily related to the ISIS.
