Happy birthday Twitter: Social media service celebrates 10 years

Twitter is celebrating its 10th birthday.

Since the first tweet was sent on March 21st, 2006, it has gathered about 332 million monthly users, with 500 million tweets sent every day and 200 billion sent a year.

Among Irish users, the platform was key in the marriage equality debate, spreading the #HometoVote campaign and becoming a platform for discussing and sharing stories on the marriage referendum.

During the general election, there were more than 158 million views of #GE16 tweets during the campaign.

The most-followed Twitter user in Ireland is One Direction’s Niall Horan, who has 24.7 million followers. Next on the list is Rory McIlroy, with 2.7 million followers, and Dara Ó Briain, who has 2.3 million.

Many of the features that have become familiar to Twitter users were not available in the original version of the service. The first tweet was sent by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who kept it short and sweet with “Just setting up my twttr”.

It was 2007 before the hashtag made its appearance on the platform, and the retweet, which was created by users, became an official Twitter feature in 2009.

Issues

But Twitter has had its share of issues. The company floated on the stock exchange in 2013, with shares set at $26. In January 2014, shares hit a high of $69, but as of Friday, the stock was trading at $16.84.

It has also come under fire for its reaction to trolling and abuse on the platform, before it announced plans for a “report abuse” button across all versions of the site. That move followed a petition to make complaining about Twitter harassment easier, which attracted tens of thousands of signatures.