It seems incredible to think that Twitter, a social network that many consider almost indispensable in our daily life, just take a few years with us. More amazing is to think as how this network has come to stand out from the rest and become a real social speaker. Therefore the twitterers around the world come together to congratulate Twitter on its sixth birthday.

The story began on a day like any other in 2006, when Jack Dorsey published what would be the first public tweet, a brief message that simply said “just setting up my twttr” (“installing my twttr”). He couldn’t have imagined that in six years, people across the world would be sending over 12233 tweets a second, as witnessed during Superbowl 2012. Now, six years later, its growth shows how much it has been integrated into our daily routine. Just a month ago, Twitter announced that the social network has more than 500 million registered users.

The Evolution of Twitter

The story of the genesis of Twitter says that the service was created with the intention of Dorsey to offer a tool that would combine the traditional blog  with the speed and immediacy of features like SMS on mobile phones.

The easy-to-use service is used by millions of Internet users worldwide. More than 500 million people use the service: for celebrities, athletes, politicians, journalists and businesses, Twitter is now an important marketing tool.

Information now passes through this platform faster than most others, and there is no newspaper or news program that can deny the influence of Twitter’s messaging platform.

Twitter was the tool of the demonstrators at the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. Even the spectacular landing of an aircraft on the Hudson River in New York was first spread on Twitter.

And since the social site has revised its strategy of engagement, more and more companies have turned their attention on Twitter.

The company periodically raised money to catch up with the growing demand for the site. In October last year, Apple integrated Twitter into iOS5,  and Apple has had a significant hand in getting the social network to the 500 million mark.

Facts and Figures

It took Twitter three years two months and one day to reach a billion tweets. Nowadays we all tweet a billion tweets within a week. The company is adding 11 new accounts per second. In September, Twitter announced that the number of active users per month at the social site had risen to 100 million.

The site is receiving more than 400 million monthly unique visitors. U.S, Brazil and Japan are the top three countries on Twitter followed by Indonesia and India with 13 million users.

As far as celebrities go, Lady Gaga is the most popular celebrity on Twitter, followed by Justin Bieber and Katy Perry.

Twitter users up, but lacks a real business plan

The microblogging platform recorded a steady increase of users, but is still far from being able to monetize them.

The site has so far been able to strengthen, broaden its user base, testing some more or less effective strategies for raking in money. Failing on some of the goals set out for 2011, the company aims to bring home $260 million in 2012. Now the platform is ready to introduce new forms of advertising (such as business tweets that appear on the main stream even if you are not followers of the promoted brand), with the ambitious goal of about $400 million in revenue by next year, and a billion dollars in 2016.

Last year the company launched their Analytics tool, another step towards monetizing its platform. Twitter has provided a statistics tool intended for website owners wanting to know the impact of traffic from Twitter, as well as buttons for sharing. Twitter also provides an API for developers wishing to integrate data from Twitter Analytics into their products.

We have also seen the company’s goals for monetization when they acquired AdGrok last year, which provides advertising platform of running internet marketing campaigns for small businesses.  Extending their publishing platform is also important, as Twitter completely revamped their user interface, even customizing for languages that read from right to left, and acquiring the Posterous blogging platform earlier this month.

Security Concerns

Twitter continues to grow in popularity in global communications. The microblogging site recently disclosed what it can do by communicating election information out of Iran. This has raised nagging concerns over Twitter on security risks, privacy threats and regulatory compliance.

Millions of Twitter users around the world were affected when the popular social networking website succumbed to a virus for a few hours in September 2010. Security experts worry it exposed a nasty security flaw, one that could be exploited by hackers in the future to install malicious software and steal personal information.

While Twitter has grown tremendously over the years, becoming one of the most important advancements of our generation.  But the microblog still has plenty of room to grow, developing its ecosystem to generate revenue for the company, and dealing with the rising security concerns, especially for mobile users.  Twitter’s influence isn’t likely to wane any time soon, and who knows where we’ll be another six years from now.