Five years ago today Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent a simple message that would change the way many of us use social media. Dorsey simply typed and posted “just setting up my twttr” and now just five years later more than 30 billion messages of 140-characters-or-less have been sent and the company’s worth is quickly approaching a $10 billion valuation.
According to some analysts Twitter in 2011 will pull in $150 million in revenue, helped in part by current advertising options and with new technologies in the works or yet to be thought up.
But it’s not all a rosy outlook for the social network, Twitter has recently begun fighting against third-party app developers who have used their company API to build new Twitter platforms, deciding that they would rather control the way Twitter content is displayed, while capturing more of the revenue streams offered by the their own network.
It’s been a wild ride with celebrities using the platform to share their lives, various causes using the platform to draw awareness to their fights and many other types of organizations still discovering the power the network can provide for them. From multi-billion buyout rumors from the likes of Google and Microsoft, one thing is for certain, Twitter continues to have a pull on mainstream society, perhaps that’s why Evan Williams recently predicted that the company would soon hit 1 billion users, a lofty, but quite possible goal.
What would you like to see from Twitter in the next 5 years?
