At 10 years old, Twitter seeks followers, profits

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Happy birthday, Twitter.

The social media site famous for hashtags and a 140-character “tweet” limit turned 10 years old Monday, having evolved from what was originally billed as a “microblogging” site into one of the Internet’s most influential means of communication.

The world’s first tweet, which was sent by co-founder Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006, read “just setting up my twttr.”

When Capt. Chesley Sullenberger safely landed a disabled US Airways plane with 150 passengers into a frigid Hudson River in January 2009, witnesses tweeted photos of passengers being rescued from the floating plane. At the time, it seemed unthinkable that Twitter didn’t exist just a few years earlier.

Now presidents – and the Pope – have Twitter accounts.

But after a long streak of robust growth that turned it into one of the Internet’s hottest companies, Twitter’s expansion has slowed dramatically over the past year and a half.

At the end of 2015, it had about 320 million active users, far short of social networking leader Facebook and its 1.5 billion users.

Twitter Inc. executives have acknowledged their struggle to convince people the service is essential. They have tweaked Twitter’s format in a bid to make it easier and more engaging to use. That’s seen as key to expanding Twitter’s user base, which would in turn allow it to sell more advertising and to begin to make money for the first time.