1. The following research was found off the internet and helped us to
understand the background of Twitter and some interesting facts
about it. It also provided us with many statistics that we will use in
the script for our documentary.
1.Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July of that year.
2.Twitter’s origins lie in a “day long brainstorming session” that was held by board members of the
podcasting company Odeo. While sitting in a park on a children’s slide and eating Mexican food,
Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small
group.
3.The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full
version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006
4.The original project code name for the service was ‘twttr‘, an idea that Williams later ascribed to
Noah Glass, inspired by the name of the social media image website ‘Flickr’ and the five-character
length of American SMS short codes.
5.The team finally settled on the name ‘twitter‘, which means ‘chirps from birds’ in essence ‘a short
burst of inconsequential information’
6.The tipping point for Twitter’s popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. During
the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000.
7.It had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007
8.In 2008 there were only 3 million registered users
9.In 2008 there were only 1.25 million tweets per day
10.Jan 2008 there were only 8 employees
11.In 2009 or 2 years ago Twitter had 8 million registered users
12.In 2011 there are now over 400 employees
13.75% of Twitter traffic comes from third-party applications
14.60% of all tweets come from third-party apps
15.There are over 100,000 Twitter applications
16.A Forrester report revealed that “Twitterers are the connected of the connected, overindexing
at all Social Media habits. For example, Twitterers are three times more likely to be Creators (people
who create and share content via blog posts and YouTube) as the general US population” (source
Forrester report “Who Flocks to Twitter”)

2. 17.3 years, 2 months and 1 day…the time it took from the first tweet to the billionth tweet.
18.It now takes one week for users to send a billion Tweets.
19.In March 2010 the average number of tweets people sent per week was the the 350 million.
20.140 million is the average number of tweets people sent per day in February 2011
21.177 million tweets sent on March 11, 2011.
22.When Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 there were 456 tweets per second (TPS)…a record
at that time.
23.The current TPS record is 6,939 tweets per second set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New
Year’s Day
24.572,000 is the number of new accounts created in one day (March 12, 2011)
25.460,000 is the average number of new accounts per day created in February, 2011
26.182% is the increase in number of mobile users over the past year.
27.In March 2011 there are an estimated 225 million users
28.25 billion tweets sent on Twitter in 2010
29.100 million new accounts added on Twitter in 2010
30.The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station
by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010
Read more at http://www.jeffbullas.com/2011/05/02/30-terrific-twitter-facts-and-
figures/#aVdYuyyOkc5oHJM9.99
Dorsey (left) said after a Twitter Town Hall with Barack Obama
held in July 2011, that Twitter received over 110,000
#AskObama tweets
Jack Dorsey (born November 19, 1976) is an American web
developer and businessman widely known as the creator of
Twitter and as the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile
payments company. In 2008, he was named to the
MITTechnology ReviewTR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35
Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its
users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets".It was
created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained
worldwide popularity, with over 500 million active users as of 2012, generating over 340
million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billionsearch queries per day. Since its launch,

3. Twitter has become one of the top 10 most visited websites on the Internet, and has been
described as "the SMS of the Internet. Unregistered users can read tweets, while registered
users can post tweets through the website interface, SMS, or a range of apps for mobile
devices.Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco, with additional servers and offices in New
York City, Boston, and San Antonio.
Trending topics
A word, phrase or topic that is tagged at a greater rate than other tags is said to be a trending
topic. Trending topics become popular either through a concerted effort by users or because
of an event that prompts people to talk about one specific topic.[75] These topics help Twitter
and their users to understand what is happening in the world.[76]
Trending topics are sometimes the result of concerted efforts by fans of certain celebrities or
cultural phenomena, particularly Lady Gaga (known as Monsters), Justin Bieber (Beliebers)
and fans of the Twilight (Twihards) and Harry Potter (Potterheads) novels. Twitter have
altered the trend algorithm in the past to prevent manipulation of this type.[77]
Twitter's March 30, 2010 blog post announced that the hottest Twitter trending topics will
scroll across the Twitter homepage.[78] Users will also be able to find
out how a specific topic became a trending topic.[citation needed]
There have been controversies surrounding Twitter trending topics:
Twitter has censored hashtags that other users found offensive.
Twitter censored the #Thatsafrican[79] and the
#thingsdarkiessay[80]hashtags after users complained that they found
the hashtags offensive
Hashtags are words or phrases prefixed with the symbol #,[1][2] a
form of metadata tag. Also, short messages on microbloggingsocial
networking services such as Twitter, identi.ca or Google+ may be
tagged by including one or more with multiple words concatenated,
e.g.:
http://www.celebritytweet.com/
Lady Gaga has the most twitter followers in the world