Twitter by the dozen: Microblogging site enters its first teen year

Twelve years ago to the day, March 21, Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, could scarcely have imagined that brevity could become a $2 billion-plus company - which is exactly what the micro-blogging site has become since that first tweet by Dorsey himself in 2006.

Twitter has always been plagued by performance issues - earning its first ever profit in the last quarter of 2017, prior to which there has been just a sea of red in its bottomline.Of its $2.44 billion in revenue last year, $2.11 billion came in from advertising. However, the company still ended the year with a loss of $108 million. In fact, its revenue growth has fallen drastically in the last three years - from 58 per cent in 2015 to 14 per cent in 2016 to a negative three per cent last year.

The Twitter logo, known as Larry the bird, is named after former US basketball player and Olympic Gold Medal winner, Larry Bird, who was part of the first ever Dream Team of professional basketball players to win the Olympic gold in 1992.

Over the years, the site has had several epochal moments - including the most famous selfie of all time and the second-most retweeted tweet, with 3.39 million retweets, shot at the Oscars in 2014, featuring Hollywood A-listers like Meryl Streep, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Bradley Cooper, Lupita Nyong O, Julia Roberts and Jennifer Lawrence, along with Ellen DeGeneres.

Twitter's user engagement is still far less than its peers in the social networking and digital space. While Facebook leads with nearly 2.17 billion monthly active users, Twitter is not even in the top 10 - with 330 million monthly active users at the end of 2017.

The company, of course, has tried several tactics to gain more users - from expanding the initial 140-character limit to 280 last year, to adding the retweet feature, which itself underwent several changes, from not including the RT and @username attribution in the character count and then allowing retweeters to add comments of their own.

The challenge before Twitter, as it enters its teen years, is the problem of trolls, who have forced several users, including celebrities such as Ed Sheeran and Alec Baldwin, to go off the site. Twitter took some measures a few years back to stop hate messages, abusive language and trolls - which included asking suspended account holders for their phone numbers. That, however, may be a case of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.