Today marks Twitter's 10th birthday - ten years of hashtags, re-tweets and favorites (and a few months of 'hearts'). The platform's come a long way over the past decade, evolving from a simple text message based application into an integral part of the wider communications landscape, with it's real-time stream now playing a crucial role in how we connect and communicate. And Twitter definitely does play an important tole - a study conducted by Cision last year found that 51% of journalists believe they'd no longer be able to function without social media, with Twitter the most popular platform on aggregate. Twitter data, and insight, is indeed powerful, and it's amazing to consider just how far it's come since Jack Dorsey sent that first tweet.
To mark the occasion, and to celebrate the wider role the platform now plays in our media landscape, Twitter's put together a couple of infographics outlining some key moments in the development of the service. First up is a chart which looks at some of the critical events in the tweet history, including the invention of the hashtag, President Obama's victory tweet and the first tweet from space.
The second listing looks at some of the key record holders on Twitter, including the most re-tweeted tweet, the most followed Twitter user and the most commonly used emoji on the site.
There's some impressive numbers in there, and it serves as a great reminder of just how far the platform has come, just how many events, careers and trends in which tweets have played an important part. Twitter's also produced a GIF which looks at the evolution of their bird logo, which has seen some significant image transformations over time.
Meanwhile, Twitter's data team has been working on some visualizations highlighting the power and reach of tweets, including this one which looks at how Ellen's famous Oscar's selfie spread throughout the network.
Explore how iconic Tweets from the past 10 years spread around the world #LoveTwitterhttps://t.co/v1tgHx7w73 pic.twitter.com/Jl6UYhks7V
- Twitter Data (@TwitterData) March 21, 2016
There's some interesting insights there, and again, they underline just how integral Twitter has become, just how big a role the platform now plays in the media process.
While there's not been a lot of good news coming out of Twitter HQ of late, the charts here serve as a great reminder of just how far Twitter has come, and just how important it now is. As I noted in a post last week, Twitter's stream of real-time data is able to provide insights on a scale we've not yet fully realized - Twitter, more than any other platform, has the capacity to change the world in it's capacity as a real time monitoring and response tool. Nothing else matches Twitter on this front, and while there are still many challenges ahead for the micro-blog giant, it's safe to assume that tweets will be playing a big part in our lives for some time to come yet.