Twitter Celebrates Its Sixth Birthday
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Saeed Khan/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — “Just setting up my twttr,” Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent from a service that no one had heard of exactly six years ago. It was the first tweet, or 140-character message, to ever be sent on Twitter.
Twitter hasn’t changed all that much since Dorsey fired off that tweet at 3:50 p.m. on March 21, 2006. However, while the format is the same – 140 characters to make a statement, hashtags used to sort by topic, and an @ symbol attached to a username – the service has changed the way millions of people consume information, share and communicate.
“It’s really been about how people have changed around the platform and they’ve gotten very used to conversing in these short text bursts,” says Mashable editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff, who uses Twitter daily. He says people are turning to Twitter first as a way to get their news out.
“It’s become incredibly important in people’s lives to share information first with their audience, with their friends, you know, people they’ve never met before, but it’s just become a truly powerful platform.”
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio