11/05/2011
One of the most important social networks turned five this month: Twitter. During those years the new social phenomenon built up some interesting statistics.
On the 21st of March 2006, Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter, sent the first official Twitter message, also known as a tweet, into the world through the world wide web. With the words ‘Inviting coworkers’, he wanted to persuade his colleagues to join him in using the newest social network, which was founded in San Francisco. Today, Dorsey is chairman of one of the fastest growing internet companies in the world, and therefore a competitor to companies like Google.
A tweet may only consist 140 characters, including white spaces. In the beginning, Twitter messages had no limit but when a tweet contained more than 160 characters, it was split into two parts. The ‘140-character-limit’ has forced people to come to the point and that is mostly not a bad thing. When it comes to providing or seeking news, the limit ensures that messages contain only the main information. This certainly speeded up the news process and changed journalism.
Charlie Sheen
Great events like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the death of a celebrity and the Arab revolutions create surges in the use of Twitter. 456 tweets per second were sent out the day that Michael Jackson passed away. The record though was set in Japan, on New Year’s Eve. 7000 Twitter messages were sent out that night. Another record was set by Charlie Sheen. In the beginning of March he created an account and within 25 hours and 17 minutes he had one million followers. The third record was set one day after the earthquake in Japan on the 12th of March 2011, when a record amount of users, 572.000, was measured.
Twitter needed three years, two months and a day to celebrate its billionth tweet. Since the beginning 175 million people have created an account but only 30 million really use it. Facebook on the other hand has 200 million active users, so Twitter still has some catching up to do. 7 % of the accounts are from people in Europe and of course the USA is the leader with regard to active Twitter users.
The gulf & Gaga
At the end of 2010 Twitter published an overview of the most discussed topics on their website. The ‘gulf oil spill’ was the trend in the previous year, followed by the ‘FIFA Word Cup’ on the movie ‘Inception’. Teen idol Justin Bieber, the new president of Brazil since January Dilma Rousseff and singer and fashion icon Lady Gaga were the most discussed people on Twitter.
Twitter has already an immense list of accomplishments and we cannot but agree to the fact that news travels around faster because of this social network. But how big will Twitter be when it celebrates its tenth or fifteenth birthday? And which role will the website play in journalism? Let us tweet and see.
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Fel radio reportage.
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