From the Pope to Justin Bieber, from Lady Gaga to Barack Obama, passing through the hashtags of events that have made history, such as that #jan25 that followed the evolution of the riots in Egypt: if not half the world, certainly half a billion people around the world use Twitter today, the social network (or rather the microblogging site) which, founded in 2006, two years after Facebook, is visibly catching up with Mark Zuckerberg, who has meanwhile reached one billion subscribers.
Many argue that the future of communication lies more in those 140-character tweets than in the format created by the former Harvard student: meanwhile, as well as in the race for users and appeal (every month there are over 200 million active users, messages 400 million and the advertising turnover close to one billion), Twitter also joins its rival Facebook on the stock market.
The debut is expected in a few months (since the turnover is still less than a billion dollars, the San Francisco company is not required to give precise communications in this sense) and according to analysts it will be valued at around 10 billion dollars, exactly one tenth of the Facebook IPO, the eighth largest in financial history.
But how did the saga of the little blue bird begin? He, the mascot, is celebrating three years today, but it was 2005 when a group of four friends who worked together in a podcasting company called Odeo, founded a web platform on which Internet users could exchange "humorous" notes via mobile phone. The new site created by Noah Glass, Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey was first called Stat.us and then Twitter, officially founded in March 2006 and publicly presented in July of the same year.
The new adventure begins immediately with a Web Award at Southwest's Sxsw conference, then is refined by arriving at the current name, Twitter, and the now infamous retweets and hashtags. Then there is the idea of the chirping bird and from there the "dolphin" of Facebook "begins its cult ascent: first pop stars, then actors, sports stars and finally even the most powerful men in the world , which through 140 characters are able to communicate, instantly, to millions and millions of followers all over the planet. And so Barack Obama announced his re-election to the White House on Twitter less than a year ago, and even the Pope created an account in December 2012.
A phenomenon, that of Twitter, which in all respects is retracing the footsteps of its all-time rival, Facebook. Now also in the adventure on the Stock Exchange. Hoping, however, that the outcome is different.
