Jack Dorsey and Noah Glass has showcased the Odeo team with the concept of creating a Short Message
Service (SMS) system that allowed people to update to one number – 40404 – that would be broadcast to all. A part of the Odeo team built a website that allowed Odeo employees to send text messages of 140 characters or less about what they were doing. On July 15, 2006, Twitter was officially introduced to the public. By fall 2006, Twitter had thousands of users. (p.5-p.17)
However, there were three core problems that Twitter was facing:
1. The users wanted more than 140 characters to express themselves (Gilbert. S, 2015 - p.5-p.17)
As noted by Widrich, L. (2011), the big buzz around Twitter generated during South by Southwest
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In 2007, Twitter team started working on solving the problems of users’ needs and increasing the functionality of the platform. This led to the debut of hashtag (#) on Twitter which was highly successful. The idea of hashtag was the help users to keep track of topics which were previously not easy to track. In addition to this, the hashtag enabled users to present and communicate their tweets with friends even more effectively. Hashtags were searchable. By including hashtags in their tweets, user would firstly add additional detail of category/topic and also increase the reach of the tweet to public.
About over 100 million tweets were being posted every quarter in 2008. Twitter continued developing new changes to improve their product and increase functionality. Twitter introduced the Trending Topics feature in 2008 and Suggested Users and Retweet feature in 2009. All these features helped and attracted users to explore more of Twitter. By 2009, Twitter’s popularity had grown so much that it became the third most popular social networking website. The new feature developments were attracting more users.
As Gilbert, S. (2015) also noted that, Twitter had now become much more than it was planned to be. On
June 16