The ubiquitous social network that made #hashtags famous, Twitter, is celebrating its seventh birthday this week. To highlight the occasion, a video featuring its historic events and milestones was released.
The company started on March 21, 2006, with Twitter's co-founder Jack Dorsey's first tweet, "just setting up my twttr," alluding to the company's vowel-less name at that time, Huffington Post reports.
Dorsey, who is now running the mobile payments company Square, has come a long way, as his New York City mayoralty ambitions revealed in a 60 Minutes program indicate.
With north of 200 million active users in 2013, the social media giant seems to be only getting started. It has recently announced a foray into the digital music world with Twitter Music and has introduced video service Vine.
"Twitter has become a true global town square — a public place to hear the latest news, exchange ideas and connect with people all in real time," said the company's editorial director, Karen Wickre, as reported by the Washington Post.
More than 400 million tweets are sent per day —- up from the 340 million figure the company said it was seeing on its sixth birthday last year — and the service has become a popular outlet for celebrity actors, athletes and musicians to vent their frustration, celebrate and even taunt others. Even the Vatican has taken to Twitter as a communication tool.
Of course, what would a birthday be without a cake and a video? The "Celebrating #Twitter7" video, making its rounds around the Web, highlights milestones in Twitter's history, but has garnered only a paltry 22,500 views on YouTube (although it's likely going to be a trending topic on Twitter itself). There's more than a fair share of political overtones, as the network has helped a number of causes, from the 2011 Egyptian revolution to the election of President Obama, whose photo hugging the First Lady with the caption "four more years," was widely viewed.
