Twitter was started in 2006 by four internet
entrepreneurs, and it took 3 years to get to one billion
tweets. However, today over one billion tweets are sent
every week. Here's some really interesting things you
probably don't know about Twitter.
1. Twitter was actually created on a playground. The
founding team members were at the top of a slide in a
playground in San Francisco, when Jack Dorsey said "I've
got an idea so simple that you don't even think about it -
you just write."
2. At first glance it may seem that, unlike most websites,
Twitter is advertisement free. But that's not quite true,
Twitter is a business, and it does make money through
cleverly disguised advertisements. Twitter has two main
revenue streams, firstly Google and Bing pay Twitter a
handsome license fee so that they can include tweets in
their realtime search results. And secondly big brands
such as Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Red Bull and many others
pay Twitter for sponsored tweets which appear in Twitter
search results. Brands can also pay for "promoted
trends" which appear amongst the other naturally
trending topics. The cost for a Promoted Trend in the
United States for one day is $200,000.
3. Twitter gave the city of Boston a promoted trend free
of charge after the Boston Marathon bombing in April
2013. The trend was #OneBoston.
4. But when it comes to profit, Twitter is very different
the likes of Facebook, Google and Apple. Because Twitter
has never made a single dime of profit. In 2014 Twitter
made a net loss of $578 million. Which can be attributed
to its rapid expansion and excruciatingly high operating
costs.
5. But why are Twitter's operating costs so high. Well, it
has a lot to do with the fact that 500 million tweets are
sent every day. Which is an astonishing 6,000 tweets per
second. All those messages take an awful lot of
processing power and storage.
6. A single day's worth of Twitter posts would fill a 10
million page book.
7. The person with the most followers on Twitter is Katy
Perry who has 68 million followers. Second is Justin
Bieber and third is Barack Obama.
8. The most followed brand on Twitter is YouTube, which
has 50 million followers.
9. Twitter wasn't always called Twitter, and it didn't
always have a bird as a mascot. When it launched it was
called Twttr and it looked like this. When it was being
created "Friendstalker" was also considered as a potential
name.
10. Twitter later added it's famous blue bird as its
mascot, who by the way is called Larry. Named after
basketball player, Larry Bird.
11. Twitter is responsible for starting the hashtag
phenomenon. The first ever use of the hashtag on Twitter
was, #barcamp, posted by an open source software
advocate Chris Messina. Who thought it would be a good
idea to use the hashtag to signify a group. Chris was
inspired by the hashtag's heavy use in IRC chatrooms.
He is now referred to as "The Hashtag Godfather".
12. We've all heard of a hashtag, but how about a
cashtag? Cashtags are used on Twitter by Wall Street
tweeters interested in tracking the news around stocks.
13. Speaking of news, Twitter has become the de-facto
source for global news. When something big happens
around the world news of it spreads on Twitter via
hashtags faster than any other news source in the world.
Because of this Twitter is now the primary resource for
the majority of TV news stations.
14. Twitter is seen as the home of super fast, and often
instantaneous communication. So it may come as a
surprise that between 2008 and 2010 to help keep the site
online Twitter had a "guy with a pager". The pager would
rotate between four people who would constantly monitor
Twitter to check if it went offline. These days they're a bit
more high tech and use automated monitoring systems to
keep the website online.
15. Twitter has 288 million active monthly users. 80% of
whom access the service through mobile devices.
16. In the early days of Twitter, they were thinking about
introducing a "worship" button. If you worshipped
someone, you would get every single one of their
messages, but the idea was ditched.
17. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said any Twitter employee
can launch any test to 1 percent of users without any
senior approvals.
18. The most retweeted tweet ever was by Ellen
DeGeneres with her star-studded selfie tweet at the 2014
Oscars. It got 3.4 million retweets.
19. Tweets containing hashtags receive two times the
levels of engagement than those without hashtags, yet
only 24 percent of tweets actually contain hashtags.
20. Twitter is on Twitter, but Twitter is also on Facebook,
and Facebook is also on Twitter. Twitter is also on
YouTube and YouTube is on Twitter.
21. There is a Twitter account called everyword that has
manually tweeted every single word in the English
dictionary. The task took them 7 years to complete.
22. There is also Twitter account with the username
SignOut that has only ever tweeted once but has 1,435
followers. Why? Because, apparently some Twitter users
think that they can sign out of Twitter by following the
account.
23. Visiting either Twittter.com (with an extra t) or
Twiter.com (missing a t) will both redirect you to the
official website.
24. The average number of followers of all users on
Twitter is 208.
25. The FBI has a dictionary of Twitter slang.
26. In order to promote diversity the official twitter
account of Sweden is given to a new random citizen
every week to manage.
27. The Library of Congress is archiving every single
tweet sent by an American citizen, because they believe
each tweet is an important part of the national narrative
of American history. Their database of tweets is over 150
terabytes and growing.
28. The CIA also reads up to 5 million tweets a day. They
could be reading yours right now.
29. 44% of Twitter users have never sent a single Tweet.
They just use the site for stalk people.
30. A report found that over 50% of Justin Bieber's
Twitter followers are fake.
31. According to the Vatican, you can reduce the time
you spend in purgatory by following the Pope on Twitter.
That sounds legit.
32. And finally, Twitter may not yet be making a profit
but it is worth $31 billion and is the 8th most visited
website on the internet. And financial analysts predict
that Twitter could finally become profitable by the end of
2015, so don't give up on the old bird just yet.

SOURCE: http://thoughty2.com/p/82/32-surprising-facts-about-twitter/

Like Larry, I perch here. #tweetlater

This would have been nice if you added a source. Unfortunately, posts without a source don't make fp.

Abi na u be the writer?

I am on twitter most times,but I hardly tweet. I just get the information I want and gerrout.