At 4:50 p.m. on March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey wrote “just setting up my twttr.” Five years later, Dorsey and his fellow Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams have transformed a neat idea conceived during a daylong brainstorming session into a worldwide phenomenon. Twitter is now valued at more than $10 billion and has gone from zero to 1 billion tweets per week.
But not all tweets are created equal. Here’s a countdown of five historic moments, brought to you by Twitter.
5. Twitter and Space
TV broadcasts of astronauts are so 1969. On January 22, 2010, Flight Engineer T.J. Creamer broadcast the first tweet from outer space: “Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! 🙂 More soon, send your ?s”
The message was made possible by a NASA software upgrade that gave Space Station astronauts direct personal access to the Web. Previously, tweets from astronauts had to be e-mailed down to Earth, then later posted to Twitter by ground-based workers.
4. Twitter and Obama
When Obama won the presidency, he tweeted: “We just made history. All of this happened because you gave your time, talent and passion. All of this happened because of you. Thanks.” Could Obama have made history without Twitter? Maybe — but the microblogging service certainly helped.
3. Twitter and Iran
Twitter was also credited with driving coverage of the event on major American TV news organizations, bringing important news to the United States that may not otherwise have received as much attention as the event deserved.
Twitter even delayed its scheduled downtime for site maintenance to keep information from Iran flowing, acknowledging in a blog post that Twitter was playing the role of “an important communication tool in Iran.”
2. Twitter and Japan
Not only are many families and their loved ones using Twitter to keep in touch after the devastating 8.9 magnitude earthquake and tsunami in Japan in March,
An hour after the quake hit Japan Twitter experienced 1,200 posted tweets per minute and, at its height, was nine of Twitter’s top 10 Trending Tropics.
1. Twitter and Egypt
When Mubarak finally stepped down, President Obama noted the role of technology in the uprising, praising Egyptians who used “their creativity, talent and technology to call for a government that represented their hopes and not their fears.”
Without the communication enabled via Twitter, the political upheaval may not have been as successful or quick. In this case, Twitter deserves a lot of credit as the means of organizing the passions of a citizenry behind a cause, connecting people all over the world, and affecting world events. Not bad for a 5-year-old.