Twitter goes public
Social media company Twitter began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on November 7th and was able to raise $1.8 billion due to investors demand. Twitter priced its inital public offering at $26 (U.S.) on Wednesday but on Thursday it rose to $45.10 (U.S.) and moved as high as $50.09 (U.S.) in early trades before settling down to $46.00 (U.S.) later in the day. Analysts, however, are skeptical that the seven year old firm will become profitable mainly due to its size and slowing growth rate. This same market buzz was seen when Facebook launched its disastrous IPO. Twitter is smaller than Facebook, with 300 million users, much less than Facebookâs one billion users. Facebook had $3.7 billion in annual revenue at its debut, while Twitter had $317 million last year.
Twitter, Inc. was founded in 2006 by Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, a former punk rocker turned computer programmer, Christopher Stone and Noah Glass. Twitter enables users to send and read "tweets", which are text messages limited to 140 characters. Registered users can read and post tweets but unregistered users can only read them. Twitter is now one of the ten most visited websites. In 2009, Twitter was mainly used by older adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter. It then began moving into the mainstream when celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and Shaquille O'Neal jumped on the bandwagon. Twitter has also been used for a variety of purposes in many industries and scenarios, such as organizing the 2011 Egyptian protest, 2010-2011 Tunisian protest and 2009-2010 Iranian election protests, or as an emergency communication system by the company itself during earthquakes, and as a place to build and promote businesses.
Here are just a few of the many books the library has about Twitter:
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