EOTO #1

Twitter 

Twitter was created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. The first ever tweet was from Jack which is pictured below. Dorsey is also the creator of Square, he never finished college because, in his senior spring he had the idea for Twitter and dropped out to follow his dreams.

The company Odeo which was a search website for audio and videos but was supposed to be a podcasting company is where the other co-founders met. Noah Glass came up with the name for Twitter but was later kicked out of the company in the early 2000s because of greed Evan Williams was his original founder and thought Glass was going to take all the credit. Biz Stone worked at Blogger with Evan Williams and they both worked there until Google bought it in 2003 and they moved over to Odeo. Evan Williams started out working with his father teaching people about the World Wide Web and later worked for various blogs and computers before working at Blogger.com and Odeo.

The original idea of Twitter was a text messaging service that you can only use up to 140 characters in a message.  When the app first launched Stone was in charge of marketing and sold it as a a new form of communication. It would be similar to a text message but cheaper and easier to connect to more people.

Twitter became popular at the South by Southwest Conference which is an annual meeting of businesses in film, media, and music that all meet in Austin, Texas. Going to this conference their number tripled from 20,000 to 60,000 tweets per day. Hashtags became a big thing on Twitter when TV shows and even celebrities. Hashtags became very popular and went hand and hand with Twitter.  2009 Twitter started to grow even more when Oprah Winfrey created an account and talked about it on her show. NASA even had astronauts using Twitter from outer space. 

Twitter started to become more of a news site when the news of Steve Jobs first broke on Twitter in 2011 and now people in other countries will use Twitter as their main source of communication during protests and wars. Politicians now also have Twitter to talk to and speak to everyone at once, Barack Obama was the first President to openly use and announce when he won the election.

Twitter had a few rough years after it went public in 2014 and had some competition with Facebook and other sites like Linkedin. The business struggled like most things during COVID-19 and never recovered when the server was hacked. Rumors were going around that someone new would come in and take over and that's exactly what Elon Musk did in 2022 when he bought the company for 44 billion dollars. Musk changed the iconic logo and name of Twitter and the bluebird to X. X is supposed to stand for the Everything app. He saw this app as more than just birds tweeting and could see how big this app could be in the future. He already launched a way to have live streams, send longer messages, and even broadcast videos. Musk named his first start-up X.com which ended up becoming Paypal. Some negative effects of this are adding options like shopping and subscriptions took away from the main goal of the page when it began to be a messaging service that everyone could use.