{"id":101507,"date":"2013-04-03T18:01:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-03T23:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/the-rise-of-twitter-a-look-at-its-success-and-impact\/"},"modified":"2025-01-03T04:53:15","modified_gmt":"2025-01-03T09:53:15","slug":"the-rise-of-twitter-a-look-at-its-success-and-impact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/en-gb\/insights\/blog\/strategy\/the-rise-of-twitter-a-look-at-its-success-and-impact\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rise of Twitter: Its Success and Impact"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Twitter\"<\/a> A few weeks ago, on 21 March, Twitter celebrated its 7th birthday, marking seven successful years since its inception. Its meteoric rise to prominence has been impressive and exciting.\u00a0 It is now the Social Media Platform of choice for celebrities and has, as Rupert Murdoch put it: \u2018helped change the news biz and the world.\u2019<\/span> In this post I\u2019m going to look back at its creation and development before moving on to explore some of the reasons why it has become so phenomenally successful as well as the impact it has had upon the wider world.<\/span> \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In The Beginning<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

Jack Dorsey<\/strong>, the man behind Twitter, first touched upon the idea while attending the University of Science and Technology in Missouri, the state where he grew up.\u00a0 He had for years been deeply interested in the coordination of city taxis and emergency services (in St. Louis) and how they so neatly synchronized and traversed the ornate city grid. <\/span> He dabbled in the industry during adolescence and some of the open-source software he created is still used by some US taxi firms.\u00a0 He claims that it was the succinct communication system of city transport that inspired the concept of Twitter.<\/span> In 2006, Jack found himself working at Odeo<\/strong>, a company specializing in podcasting and audio files.\u00a0 He has recently said of this period: \u2018I was not that interested in podcasting, but I was very interested in the team… very interested in working with Biz Stone, Noah Glass<\/strong> and lots of the engineers.\u2018<\/span> A couple of months after he began there, Apple<\/strong> completed and launched the component of Itunes<\/strong> dealing in podcasts and audio files.\u00a0 Their complete domination of the trade forced Odeo<\/em> to begin backing out of what was sure to become a dead-end industry. If the company was to survive, it needed a new direction.<\/span> Around this time, SMS, the instant messaging service, was highly popular.\u00a0 The short style of messaging made Jack think back to his dealings with city transportation services and he approached the board members of Odeo with an idea.\u00a0 In its simplest form, this was to enable a two-sentence message to be sent from a cell phone\u2019s keypad or computer to anyone who wanted to receive it.<\/span> The idea was to link the residents of a city similarly to the way the transport services in Missouri had been linked. Unusually, the idea was immediately applauded and embraced by co-founder Evan Williams<\/strong> and so Jack was provided with the resources he needed to create a basic prototype.\u00a0 In March 2006, the Twitter platform was completed and Dorsey published the first tweet ever:<\/span> \"Jack<\/a><\/span> After its release to the public on July 15, response and participation were initially slow.\u00a0 In an interview with Business Insider<\/em>, Dorsey described the average man\u2019s thought about Twitter in the early years to be \u2018Why do I want to know if my brother\u2019s eating oatmeal?<\/strong>\u2019<\/span> Five or perhaps six years ago, I can remember this phase of indifference. I certainly wasn\u2019t a fan of Twitter.\u00a0 The general sentiment of my friends and me was: \u2018why would you join Twitter when you can do the same and more on Facebook?\u2019\u00a0 To us, a tweet was simply a limited Facebook status<\/strong>; however, as it turned out, it was this restriction that would become Twitter\u2019s strength and propel the tweeting community into the hundreds of millions.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

Twitter\u2019s Success and Impact<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

The Spread of Information<\/strong><\/span> Dorsey attributes the beginning of Twitter\u2019s ascent to its use by businesses.\u00a0 He has mentioned specifically a network of internet-savvy doctors in San Francisco who would use it to spread news about meetings, conferences and even social events.\u00a0 It was usage like this (by professionals and communities) that really kick-started the platform\u2019s rise to prominence.<\/span> As well as being highly useful for organisation and logistics, its utility as a medium to spread breaking news and gossip also became quickly apparent.\u00a0 In the past few years, murmurs of Twitter (as well as other Social Networking sites) forcing traditional media into obsolescence have increased in volume, and have been corroborated by many real-life instances.<\/span> The<\/span> death of Whitney Houston<\/a>, detailed on Twitter 42 minutes before an official news outlet, or the clueless IT consultant who tweeted unknowingly about the<\/span> Osama Ben Laden raid<\/a>\u00a0are just two of the many examples of huge and wide-reaching news stories that were broken on the social network first.<\/span> It has even, for a while now, been considered normal for more localized announcements, such as road accidents, house fires or bomb scares, to be announced on Twitter first.\u00a0 People started getting used to this idea back in 2008. The news coverage of an emergency plane landing in New York early the following year demonstrated this with the headline, \u2018<\/span>New York plane crash:\u00a0 Twitter breaks news, again<\/a>.\u2019<\/span> \u00a0<\/span> A Tool of Logistics<\/strong><\/span> Its unmatched capacity to spread information instantaneously far and wide can be seen in its usage in the 2011 Egyptian Protests and its resultant forced shutdown by the nation\u2019s government.\u00a0 Twitter was also a major tool of logistics and organisation during the 2010-2011 Tunisian Protests and the Iranian Election Protests a year earlier, among many others.<\/span> The tool has also, however, often been taken up by governments and other official bodies for more \u2018constructive\u2019 purposes.<\/span> For many, Twitter replaced all other information outlets during Hurricane Sandy<\/strong> in the US last year.\u00a0 Useful and important information could be relayed instantly to the people, informing them about things like rising water levels, damaged buildings, problems with infrastructure and power.\u00a0 Never before was such a huge amount of<\/span> specific, localised and important information<\/a> so easy for so many to access. Who knows how many further casualties Twitter prevented in this instance?<\/strong><\/span> \u00a0<\/strong><\/span> Twitter\u2019s Political Role<\/strong><\/span> The social network has also taken an increasingly prominent role in the political world in recent years too.\u00a0 The culmination of this trend was probably reached during the 2012 American presidential election, proving the <\/span>prediction<\/a> of Dick Costolo<\/strong>, the current CEO, to be bang on the money!<\/span> According to Twitter Inc. the presidential debate on October 4 2012 generated more than 10-million tweets<\/strong>, more than any other event in US political history.\u00a0 This systematic mass of opinions and comments gave journalists, strategists, political junkies and commentators more insight into the event than had ever been possible before. It helped a lot of voters to put the issues under discussion into context and better understand the process as a whole.<\/span> Undecided voters could often be swayed by the tweets and online voice of political candidates and their supporters. Obama used this to his advantage like no one before.\u00a0 He has been more digitally active than any other political figure and his presence on Twitter has been one of the most compelling and important pillars of his political career.<\/span> His followers have had unprecedented access to his private life and the steady stream of charming photos, make him perhaps the most relatable and of-the-people president yet.<\/span> \u00a0<\/span> \"Twitter<\/a><\/span> Being ‘one of the lads!’<\/em><\/span> \u00a0<\/span> \"\"<\/a><\/span> Loved by the People!<\/em><\/span> \u00a0<\/span> And, my personal favourite:<\/span> \"Twitter<\/a><\/span> How good is this man’s PR team?<\/em><\/span> \u00a0<\/span> The photo posted after his victory, showing him in an embrace with his wife Michelle, quickly became the most retweeted message ever \u2013 trouncing the second (Justin Bieber<\/strong>) by a <\/span>staggering amount.<\/span><\/a> Always Positive?<\/strong><\/span> Although Obama has mostly attracted appreciative and positive messages from the online community, this is not always the case. Setting aside the dark world of<\/span> anonymous trolling<\/a>, many public figures have been humiliated and abused after joining<\/span> the platform.\u00a0 George Osborne, for example, received a<\/span> torrent of abuse<\/span><\/a><\/span> after signing up and the Pope was also not safe from a mass of sarcastic<\/span><\/span> quipping and criticism<\/a>.<\/span> Before Twitter, neither of these written onslaughts would have been possible, so can we call it unequivocally ‘good’?<\/strong><\/span> Twitter is a tool that allows people to be heard. Being able to voice concerns and legitimate opinions to community leaders and figureheads is always beneficial to the community as a whole and Twitter allows any subscriber to be heard by almost every ear in existence.\u00a0 It gives individuals a voice like never before and although this can be abused in various ways (as can most forms of technology), it is, unquestionably, a good thing.<\/span> \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\n \n
\n
\n

\n Stay Forward <\/h2>\n

\n Get exclusive insights into digital
media's top-trending topics delivered
directly to your inbox. <\/p>\n <\/div>\n\n

\n
\n
\n
\n \n