Twitter suffered a massive fall in its shares on Monday after Elon Musk bailed out of his buyout offer. Recent updates suggest the social media company may take Musk to court for dumping the deal. However, this is not the only major miss since the microblogging website’s launch on July 15, 2006. To be fair, there have been some major hits as well.
Here’s a look at Twitter’s journey through the years on its 16th birthday.
2006: Inception and the first tweet
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey along with Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass co-founded Twitter Inc. in 2006. Dorsey made the first tweet in March 2006.
just setting up my twttr
— jack (@jack) March 21, 2006
2008: Evan Williams becomes CEO
In October 2008, Evan Williams took over as CEO. Whereas Jack Dorsey became the chairman of the board.
2009: Launch of ‘verified’ blue tick, hyperlinked hashtags and retweet buttons
In 2009, Twitter launched the blue ‘verified’ tick to prevent the impersonation of well-known individuals and companies.
In the same year, it made hashtags automatically hyperlinked.
Twitter also started rolling out its retweet button to a few accounts as a test. It was then rolled out globally and has become a familiar part of the platform.
2010: Launch of promoted tweets
In 2010, Twitter started monetisation with promoted tweets. Brands started paying for their tweets at the top of search results pages.
Twitter soon started putting promoted tweets into people’s main feed and launched other kinds of ads as well.
2011: Quickbar controversy and introduction of blue lines
The Quickbar was a promoted trend that appeared in a grey box, constantly hovering at the top of Twitter.com. This experiment went too far for most users, and they started calling it the ‘Dickbar’ as it was introduced during Dick Costolo’s time as CEO. The feature was later dropped.
The blue lines that connected tweets in a conversation were also introduced in the same year.
2014: Animated GIFs are launched, and the ‘Ellen Selfie’ becomes the most liked tweet
The option to share and view animated GIFs on Twitter was introduced in 2014.
In the same year, the ‘Ellen selfie’ taken by Bradley Cooper at the Oscars was posted which went on to become the most liked tweet on the platform at the time.
If only Bradley's arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap
— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014
2015: Heart symbol arrives and Dorsey returns
The heart symbol replaced the favourite button and star symbol in 2015.
In June 2015, Dick Costolo announced his resignation as CEO and Dorsey assumed the post of interim CEO. He was later named as the permanent CEO on October 2015.
2017: The #MeToo movement begins
The "MeToo" phrase used to call sexual offenders and workplace harassment was first introduced by activist Tarana Burke, on MySpace in 2006. But it rose to global attention when it was linked to Twitter in October 2017.
2018: Character count increases
Twitter finally increased the character count for tweets from 140 to 280 characters for users.
2021: Tump is banned, and Twitter gets a new CEO
On January 6, 2021, the day of the Capitol attack, Twitter blocked former US President Donald Trump's account and deleted it for life two days later. Tens of thousands of QAnon accounts were also deleted.
In the same year, Jack Dorsey handed over his resignation and nominated Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal as the new CEO. Agrawal immediately replaced Dorsey as the CEO of Twitter.
2022: Elon Musk sparks buyout discussion, Twitter accepts, Musk bails out
In late March 2022, Elon Musk triggered chatter of a potential buyout deal with Twitter. On April 25, Twitter accepted Tesla CEO Elon Musk's approximately $44 billion offer to buy the company.
Later, Elon Musk backed out of the deal alleging that Twitter failed to provide information that he had asked for regarding the fake and bot accounts. Twitter signalled to take legal action against Musk for the bail out to which Musk replied in his typical style.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 11, 2022
(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)
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