Happy Birthday, Twitter!

By Eli Gibbs, Lead Photographer and Videographer

March 21, 2006 marked the opening of Twitter, a microblogging host that limits user’s posts to 140 characters. The date is recognized because it was when Jack Dorsey, the recognized creator of Twitter, posted the first tweet.

Today, it is said that there are more than 500 million created user profiles and approximately 200 million users are posting actively. It is estimated that 400 million tweets are posted each day.

To celebrate the Website’s seventh birthday, Twitter released a video demonstrating a couple of concepts for which Twitter was able to create a very successful platform.

By now, most Internet users should be familiar with the concept of a hashtag. Twitter did not create the hashtag, but its implementation allows users to search and see anyone posting on the topic. Hashtags are now created for every major sporting event, television show, political movement, cause and much more. The hashtag for the 2012 Summer Olympic games was #London2012.

The hashtag is just one tool that allows crowdsourcing to be so effective. The Jan. 15, 2009 tweet from @jkrums in the video above illustrates how he was able to be a source close to the Hudson River crash while helping rescue people from the aircraft.

The most recent Twitter development is the launch of Vine, a mobile application that creates a user-friendly interface to post short videos--no longer than six seconds, and share them on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter acquired the company and the free app debuted January 24.