Twitter goes public: $10bn: 140 characters

Twitter will float on the stock exchange at a $10bn valuation. Matt Warman asks how it grew so fast - and where it goes next?

It’s the little blue bird that has become ubiquitous across the internet – stationed at the bottom of every news story, blog post and video, there is Twitter’s inescapable invitation to share your thoughts with the world, in 140 characters or less. Every month, more than 220m users do just that, and almost two-thirds of them use the site via their mobile phones. On Thursday night, Twitter announced it was to go public at a valuation of $10bn, raising $1bn in funding and making at least one of its founders a billionaire in the process. And all this while making a loss.

Indeed, Twitter is the pin-up bird for what used to be called web 2.0 – it’s a service that is about users interacting with each other and passing around links to other websites. And because it’s primarily now mobile, it’s increasingly merging the digital with the physical: many claim the Arab spring, Barack Obama’s election and thousands of less significant events owe their success to social media. Founded in 2006, the ‘microblogging’ service has become the preferred channel of communication for countless celebrities, train companies and politicians, and many millions of users who have rather fewer than Lady Gaga’s more than 40m followers.

Conceived as a way of broadcasting text-message style thoughts to small groups, it’s widely believed that Twitter came of age at the South by Southwest Interactive technology festival in 2007, where it placed screens showing tweets around the conference centre. The idea was to both generate buzz and also to demonstrate the usefulness of being able to see what friends or colleagues were up to. Traffic tripled in three days, and today those 60,000 tweets a day are dwarfed by an average of 400m. Where analysts at the time thought Twitter would only ever be a geekish hobby, today it’s indisputably in the mainstream.

And while Twitter has evolved as a service, adding ‘verified’ accounts for individuals, incorporating news and inventing the hashtag to easily identify specific themes, fundamentally it is the same clean, largely advertising-free service that was popular in 2007. The logo may have changed, but only slightly.

Where there has been a revolution, however, is in Twitter’s effect, even leading to an infamous ‘Twitter joke trial’, in which British prosecutors brought an unsuccessful case against a frustrated traveller who threatened to blow up an airport. Even worse, it was used for death threats against leading journalists after one campaigner sought increased female representation on banknotes. Before Twitter – with its anonymous users and global reach – none of these ‘offences’ was possible at such scale and speed.