JAKARTA - Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey posted his first tweet on Twitter today 14 years ago. A few months later, on July 15, 2006, the San Francisco-based podcasting company Odeo officially released Twttr - which was later changed to Twitter - to the public.
It's not easy to bring up a social media called Twitter. Earlier in 2005, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams founded Odeo with another entrepreneur, Noah Glass. However, Odeo's main service became less popular when Apple launched iTunes.
Evan Williams then asked a team of 14 employees to brainstorm their best ideas for failed startups. Then one of the company employees, Jack Dorsey, came up with a service concept that allows users to share personal status updates via SMS to a group of people.
Quoted from History, Saturday, March 21, 2006, they had a working prototype. The purwa-form was later given the name Twttr, inspired by the sound of birds and was adopted after several name choices were rejected. Jack Dorsey then created an account called @Jack, giving it a try by sending a tweet the first time
"Just set up twttr" was his first tweet.
Born as a side project, separate from the main podcasting platform Odeo, Twttr initially only allowed users to share a short status update with a group of friends by sending one text message to the same number which is 40404. Over the next few times, Twittr evolved into a 'microblogging' service. simple one.
At the time Twttr was officially launched to the public in July 2006, Twttr was still a side project of Odeo, while the company's main offering, the podcasting platform, was not growing at all. At that time, Odeo finally had a new corporate investor, changed Odeo's name to Obvious Corporation and cut ties with Noah Glass, who actually played a role in the birth of Twitter.
Within six months of launch, Twittr changed its name to Twitter and finally had a wider range of services. Its founders imposed a limit of 140 characters per tweet, based on the maximum length of text messages at that time.
Twitter usage exploded at the Austin Convention Center, Texas, USA, in March 2007. At that time, there were over 60,000 tweets sent per day and growing rapidly from there. In 2013, the New York Times reported that the company had more than 2 thousand employees and more than 200 million active users.
Although Twitter's user base is much smaller than that of Facebook (which had more than 2 billion monthly active users in 2019), Twitter's user base often makes the platform a source of news and information, especially for younger users.
One public figure who is very active on Twitter is US President Donald Trump. He was very active on Twitter in 2016 - to be precise during the US elections - and was very outspoken on Twitter throughout his campaign. During his presidency, Trump also actively tweeted policies or other announcements.
Like other social media companies, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is under pressure to monitor content on sites more closely to prevent intimidation, harassment and hate speech. Dorsey is also required to continue to improve his platform system so that user privacy is better protected during the high political climate.
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