Twitter: In A Nutshell (2024)

If you’ve ever used social media before, chances are you’ve heard of or seen material from the Twitter platform. Twitter is a primarily text-based communication site that allows users to interact with, reply to, and share posts (commonly known as Tweets) made by any user on the website. Every user has their own unique username, and you can both create and share your own unique Tweets with others. Tweets can consist of an image/video, up to 280 characters of text, or both.

In March of 2006, a young NYU student by the name of Jack Dorsey pitched an idea of a new social media platform to his coworkers at Odeo, a podcasting service. He envisioned his idea would allow users to send short public text posts to groups of other users (like a text message but less 1-on-1) and was called “twttr” when it was first developed. It was only used by Odeo employees until it went public on July 15, 2006, when the site (now named “Twitter”) started seeing around 20,000 tweets by its users every day, and eventually grew to 60,000 by 2007 after the platform was featured in a tech conference, giving it a much-needed kickstart.

By 2008 the site was seeing over 300,000 daily tweets and skyrocketed to 50 million per day by the time 2010 rolled around. The site received a lot of attention from both individual users and from corporations looking to advertise their business — Twitter’s incorporation of hashtags after they were invented by user Chris Messina allowed users to discover much more content than before and solved the long-present issue between all social media platforms of categorizing messages in a specific topic. This boosted its user interactivity tenfold and put it among the ranks of tech giants like Facebook. Twitter had its Initial Public Offering in November 2013 to go public, giving the company much more money to work and develop with.

As the platform grew more over the years, extra features were added through a process of “rolling beta,” where new features would be given to a small portion of its user base to test and give feedback on, and later rolled out to everyone on the site. The most notable of these features were image embedding in October 2013, where images would appear in a tweet as a picture instead of just as a link, and quote tweets in April 2015, an option that merged a reply and retweet into one, where you could add text to a retweet and start your own thread of replies on your profile. The character limit on a Tweet was also increased from 140 characters to 280 characters in November of 2018, allowing for more detailed sentences and elaboration in Tweets.

A multitude of other features and quality-of-life updates have been made to the platform, including a massive overhaul to the site’s design in 2019, which changed fonts, shapes, sizes, and colors that closely resemble the current design of the website. This new design also applied to the app’s dark mode, which was added earlier in 2016 after hundreds of thousands of users requested that the feature be added to the site instead of making users rely on less-trustworthy third-party apps.

As Twitter draws in users from all corners of the internet, you’d expect there to be plenty of debates, conflict, and controversy on it as you would any other social media platform. One of Twitter’s core goals as a platform is getting people from anywhere to interact with each other, and high interaction is bound to lead to disagreements, controversy, and even hostility towards other users or groups on the site. Despite Twitter’s numerous attempts to promote a safe environment for all users, there is still plenty of racism and bigotry to be found on the site. Even worse, plenty of illegal content like child p*rnography, animal abuse, and fake misinformation accounts (mostly automated “bots”) is also accessible on the site and has prompted outrage at the platform for not doing more to crack down on this type of content.

There have always been mass debates on Twitter since it first became popular, but one of the biggest controversies in the platform’s history occurred recently in early 2022, when billionaire Elon Musk offered $44 billion to purchase Twitter, giving rise to a huge backlash from users across the globe. Musk’s strange attitude towards the offer prompted many to believe that it was nothing more than a publicity stunt by Musk to get more attention. The deal has been on hold since May, as Musk has made attempts to back out of the deal, citing reasons such as a “bot plague” that he was supposedly unaware of before he made the deal to purchase Twitter.

Overall, it’s safe to say that while Twitter is more than just a little chaotic in its current state, it’s been a benefit to the world of social media by filling a niche that no other major platform has — discussion-based image and text communication between any number of users across the world. Like every platform, Twitter has its issues, but in its current form does not rival the misinformation cults of Facebook and the influencer-dominated ranks of Instagram. It is still very much focused on the individual user and the platform has no intention of changing that anytime soon.

Manager, Jessica DeMilt Digital Marketing, and Jessica DeMilt. “The Origins of Twitter.” Pennington Creative, September 12, 2017. https://penningtoncreative.com/the-origins-of-twitter/#:~:text=The%20origins%20of%20Twitter%20date,similar%20to%20sending%20text%20messages.

Calore, Michael. “First Look: A Screenshot Tour of the New Twitter.” Wired. Conde Nast, September 16, 2010. https://www.wired.com/2010/09/first-look-a-screenshot-tour-of-the-new-twitter/.

Jr., Tom Huddleston. “This Twitter User ‘Invented’ the Hashtag in 2007 — but the Company Thought It Was ‘Too Nerdy’.” CNBC. CNBC, January 9, 2020. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/09/how-chris-messina-got-twitter-to-use-the-hashtag.html.

Siddiqui, Faiz, and Gerrit De Vynck. “Elon Musk’s Deal to Buy Twitter Is in Peril.” The Washington Post. WP Company, July 11, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/07/elon-musk-twitter-jeopardy/.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010302103333/http://www.twitter.com/

https://web.archive.org/web/20110701003438/http://twitter.com/