Today in 2006, members of Twitter’s early team sent their first messages.
The first tweet came from co-founder Jack Dorsey: “Setting up my twttr.”
Those were the days when the Internet was dropping vowels in the interest of brevity, and Twitter best exemplified the short burst of creativity that was inspired by an increasingly mobile Web and world.
That was before the iPhone, and Twitter as a platform was built in the image of SMS-style texting, when people were still pushing numbers on a telephone keypad to get to the right letter. Tweets were kept to 140 characters because of those early messaging limits.
Now 7-year-old Twitter is where 200 million people turn when events of global interest unfold. It’s hard to remember when it wasn’t like that, before January 2009, when Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger landed a US Airways plane in the Hudson.
The Twitter picture of survivors on the wings of the aircraft as it was sinking came from user @jkrums, who wrote: “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”
Andrew Fitzgerald, a senior partner manager on Twitter’s media team, remembered that as one of the platform’s defining moments, preceding the Arab Spring and President Barack Obama’s most retweeted: “Four more years.”
“The history of Twitter is all about the public moments,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s about things users have done on Twitter .”
Not only do the major public moments originate from users, so do some of the core features.
The hashtag as a way to organize tweets by topic was first employed in 2007 by user Chris Messina: “How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups?” he asked followers.
“I’m thrilled that the hashtag took off first on Twitter, and that eventually they embraced it as a core feature of the service — like other user-sourced innovations like retweets and mentions,” Messina wrote in an e-mail to The Post.
“So on their 7th anniversary, I hope they stay focused and committed to simplicity and increasing value for all Twitter users.”
Twitter is on pace to hit $545 million in ad revenue this year, according to eMarketer’s latest figures, which is almost double its revenue in 2012.
The platform has introduced paid tweets, which marketers buy to show up in the top of users’ feeds, and paid trending topics.
Perhaps the biggest advertising moment in Twitter history was this year when the Oreo brand won the Super Bowl with a well-timed Twitter campaign during the infamous blackout during the big game.
“You see a lot of interesting experiments from advertisers, real-time reactive advertising responding quickly with promoted tweets,” Fitzgerald said.
While advertisers and users shape how the platform is used today, the most crucial decision in Twitter’s infancy came from the co-founders, Biz Stone, Ev Williams and Dorsey.
“One of the early decisions we did make — or did not make — that ended up shaping Twitter’s future in a way I don’t think we could have anticipated at the time was that Twitter from very beginning has always been a mobile platform,” Fitzgerald said. “That’s a core part of the DNA.”