How Twitter Has Changed Over The Years

In today’s world of ever-expanding technology, even the oldest generations alive today are aware of the surge of social media usage in recent years. The fast growth has brought about many social networks, such as Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram, but of all of the social media networks still thriving, this essay will discuss Twitter with an emphasis on how it has evolved, how it has influenced the world, and how it has managed to stay relevant over the years.
According to Matthew Hudson at The Balance, social media is a “series of websites and applications designed to allow people to share content quickly, efficiently and in real-time” (Hudson, 2017). These networks can be accessed via smartphones, computers, tablets, and other relative devices

Twitter has grown and changed in mostly small increments. Twitter, which began as Twttr back in February of 2006, started out with a completely different interface. At first, users were only able to “send a text to one number and it would be broadcasted to all friends subscribed to it.” Leo Widrich says, “This was the founding of Twttr which eventually became Twitter.” After becoming available to the public, Twitter introduced its “API” (Widrich, 2011), which stands for Application Programming Interface (Petr Gazarov, 2016). This was “initially introduced because two small services requested it” and it is “now the very heart of Twitter’s development” (Widrich, 2011). In October of 2006, it was announced that users could “sign up for Twitter without giving away” their phone number (Widrich, 2011). Though it seemed small, this change marked a “major change in how Twitter would be used largely: via the web interface instead of real SMS,” or text messaging (Widrich, 2011). It wasn’t until February of 2007 that Twitter made their user names more prominent, allowing it to “stand out from normal names.” In May of 2007, Twitter “gets its first mobile site” and introduces the feature that allows users to block others. In the same month, the company gets “@ replies,” which has been one of the biggest and most notable changes to date. August of 2007 brought the “Twitter profile search,” followed by the invention of the famous hashtag. Though it was first called “Tracking,” what eventually became known as “hashtags” allowed users “track” or “untrack” certain topics (Widrich, 2011). In February of 2008, Twitter receives the “swoosh” function, which allows users to instantly reply to a tweet with “just one click” (Widrich,=- 2011). September of 2008 brought “Trending Topics” to the interface, which paved the way for the launch of “Promoted Tweets” in April of 2010. This