twitter.com
is an online news and social networking service where users post and interact with messages, "tweets", restricted to 140 characters.
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July of that year. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity. In 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet". As of 2016, Twitter had more than 319 million monthly active users. On the day of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Twitter proved to be the largest source of breaking news, with 40 million election-related tweets sent by 10 p.m. (Eastern Time) that day.
Stats
As of June 8, 2017, the ten Twitter accounts with the most followers were:
- Katy Perry: 99,720,962
- Justin Bieber: 96,314,286
- Barack Obama: 90,262,348
- Taylor Swift: 84,846,496
- Rihanna: 73,803,664
- Ellen DeGeneres: 69,644,515
- YouTube: 68,610,512
- Lady Gaga: 66,912,606
- Justin Timberlake: 61,090,760
- Twitter: 60,921,422
A selfie orchestrated by 86th Academy Awards host Ellen DeGeneres during the March 2, 2014 broadcast was at the time the most retweeted image ever. DeGeneres said she wanted to homage Meryl Streep's record 17 Oscar nominations by setting a new record with her, and invited other Oscar celebrities to join them. The resulting photo of twelve celebrities broke the previous retweet record within forty minutes, and was retweeted over 1.8 million times in the first hour. By the end of the ceremony it had been retweeted over 2 million times; less than 24 hours later, it had been retweeted over 2.8 million times. As of 18 March 2014, it has been retweeted over 3.4 million times. The group selfie effort was parodied by Lego, and Matt Groening with The Simpsons.It beat the previous record, 778,801, which was held by Barack Obama, following his victory in the 2012 presidential election. On May 9, 2017, Ellen's record was broken by Carter Wilkerson (@carterjwm) by collecting nearly 3.5 million retweets in a little over a month.
According to the Guinness World Records, the fastest pace to a million followers was set by actor Robert Downey Jr. in 23 hours and 22 minutes in April 2014. This record was later broken by Caitlyn Jenner, who joined the site on June 1, 2015 and amassed a million followers in just 4 hours and 3 minutes.
The most tweeted moment in the history of Twitter was during the airing of Castle in the Sky on August 2, 2013, when fans tweeted the word "balse" at the exact time that it played in the movie. There was a global peak of 143,199 tweets in one second, beating the previous record of 33,388.
With over 41 million tweets, the most discussed topic ever on Twitter was the "#ALDubEBTamangPanahon" of AlDub on October 24, 2015 during the sold out special concert presentation of the Kalyeserye segment of the noontime show Eat Bulaga entitled Eat Bulaga: Sa Tamang Panahon held at the Philippine Arena, the world's largest indoor arena located in Bulacan, Philippines. The said event was attended by over 55,000 fans.
With over 35.6 million tweets, the most discussed sports game ever on Twitter was the 2014 FIFA World Cup semi-final between Brazil and Germany on July 8, 2014.
On the day of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Twitter proved to be the largest source of breaking news, with over 40 million tweets sent that day.
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