The story of a $6B tweet and other facts about Twitter

Twitter celebrates a decade of its existence on Monday. To find out how your Twitter journey started click here. People have moved markets and celebrated victories on Twitter. Here are some interesting facts about Twitter.

1) The Twitter bird is called Larry. It was named after Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird.

2) After the news of Michael Jackson’s death, 15 per cent of the Twitter members tweeted about his death, leading to over 5,000 tweets per minute.

3) Twitter was born out of a hackathon when the founders ran out of ideas and wanted to generate new ideas.

4) Most of the features in Twitter were created by users and not the company. Hashtags, retweets, and replies were created by the users and later supported by Twitter.

5) The term cashtag was coined by Twitter to track stocks. Instead of using # symbol, a user uses $ symbol before the company ticker to represent a cashtag. For example, $GOOG. Carl Ichan, the billionaire investor, has shaken the shares of companies like Apple and Dell. When he tweeted two tweets indicating an interest in buying shares in Apple, the company's market cap increased by $17 billion, and when he tweeted about a dinner with Tim Cook the market cap had increased by $1 billion, making his three tweets worth $18 billion.

You might also like: 15 things you must know about Wikipedia on its 15th birthday

6) If Justin Bieber was a country and his followers were its inhabitants, he would be the 20th most populated country in the planet.

7) During the Twitter IPO, some investors mistakenly bought a penny stock named as TWTRQ, which was a home entertainment company. The stock of TWTRQ soared by 2,200 per cent. However, the company gave all its gains back and changed its symbol to THEGQ. Twitter symbol is TWTR.

8) Twitter did not want to use the term ‘tweets’ officially, they called them as status updates. However, they had to cave in after users insisted on the word tweets.

9) Jack Dorsey has never posted on Instagram after Facebook acquired the service.

10) Initially, it took Twitter three years, two months and one day to reach the billionth tweet. Today, it takes less than a week to reach that number.