What Is X (Twitter)?

Twitter is a social network and a microblogging website, through which users can publish short messages, known as “tweets”, hence the name, that is visible to other users. These messages can only be of 140 characters or less in length.

What is X (Twitter) used for?

Once you’re a registered user, you can post, like, and retweet tweets within the app. There are many uses of Twitter, including communication between friends and family, a simple way to publicize an event and an effective way for companies to keep in touch with their costumers.

Origins of X (Twitter)

Twitter, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California, and has more than 25 offices in the world. It was originally created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006, then launched in July of that year.

The service rapidly gained popularity and in 2012, an estimated 100 million users were posting 340 million tweets a day. On the other hand, the service managed an average of 1.6 billion search inquires per day. Twitter also ranked on the top of ten most-visited websites and was described as “The SMS of the Internet”.

The game-changer for Twitter’s popularity dates back to the year 2007 when the South by Southeast Interactive conference took place. During this event, the usage of Twitter reported an increase from 20.000 tweets per day to 60.000 tweets per day.

The app’s usage spikes during important events. For example, a record was set during the 2010 FIFA World Cup when fans wrote 2.900 tweets per second. One time, when the server actually crashed due to the high amount of tweets was when American singer Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2019.

Twitter gained application developer Atebits in the year 2011, which developed award-winning Twitter client “Tweetie” for Mac and iPhone users. Now, the application called Twitter distributes free of charge and is the official Twitter client for the iPhone, Mac, and iPod