Twitter 2010: The year Twitter grows up

Twitter has had an extremely good year. In four years the microblogging site has gone from niche to mainstream. It’s difficult these days to find a website that doesn’t have a Twitter linking badge or watch a TV show and have it not mention the site. As 2010 draws to a close, it’s a good time to look back at the year that was. 

In 2010, Twitter had on average 213.4 million visitors a month and 26 million unique visits making it the 10th most visited site on the web. By the end of the year, they are projected to have sent over 29 billion tweets and have 90 million tweets a day. 

Over the course of the year such influential people as Bill Gates, Dalai Lama, Hugo Chávez, Kanye West, Tiger Woods and Donald Rumsfeld have joined the site. British Petroleum used the site to communicate the oil spill efforts and Wyclef Jean used Twitter to raise money for Haiti. 

One of the main complaints with the site has been how limited it has been. The site has grown and flourished thanks to third party apps. This year Twitter changed all that. They kicked things off with their geolocation project called @Anywhere. That was quickly followed up with official apps for the Blackberry, iPhone and Android phones and the iPad. 

They weren’t finished yet. Next they focused on improving the built in features. New features like “Reply to All,” “Who to Follow” and “Auto completion” were added and before they were finished a whole new interface was introduced to praise and condemnation. Finally, they started rolling out profile analytics.

In the course of a year, Twitter has had incredible growth, undercut the third party apps that built their business model on Twitter and got into a bidding war that raised its value to $4 billion. Not bad for a company that just a year ago seemed to be drifting with no real business plan. 

Check out the infographic created by Flowtown that covers the year that was.  Where do you see Twitter going in 2011?

 

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.

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Comments

[Maria Payroll]

Twitter really made 2010 its year. It's fun to use and very informative as well. I actually got my first job through it.