Five Years Of Twitter

"It'll never work! I mean it's just people saying what they had for breakfast, who's interested in that?" Well it seems that 200 million users who send 1 billion tweets a week are.

This day five years ago @Jack Dorsey posted the first ever tweet and it looks like with 460,000 new users every day in the last month Twitter shows no sign of abating. After Michael Jackson died in 2009 there was an average of 456 tweets per second. That record was broken on New Year’s Day this year with 6,939 tweets being sent 4 seconds after midnight when the new year rang in in Japan.

So what has it done in the last 5 years?

Twitter has been responsible for:

• The arrest of Paul Chambers who threatened to blow up an airport.
• Aiding the uprisings in Egypt and Iran
• Embarrassing Habitat which used hashtags inappropriately to promote their sales.
• Outing Trafigura for dumping oil of the coast of Ivory coast even though there had been an injunction against naming them. (The injunction was quickly overturned once the word broke on Twitter.)
• Breaking the news first when a plane crash landed in the Hudson river and Twitpic enabled the first photograph to be posted
• Telling everyone first about Michael Jackson's death
• Enabling Charlie Sheen to get a million followers in a single day
• Losing Gilbert Gottfred his job
• Providing millions of people their main source of news on a daily basis – the Japanese tsunami and nuclear reactor problems and events in Libya being the most recent examples.

Are you surprised at Twitter's success?

Do you still not get it?

What is your favourite Twitter story?