How to use Twitter ?

The iconic little fellow—seen in Twitter’s logo shown in TV commercials, print ads and practically every website—was named after Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird.

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass and launched in July 2006

10. Why choose to name the bird after a basketball star who played in Boston?

It may have to do with Twitter co-founder Stone growing up in Massachusetts.

Go to the Twitter website, where you will see a sign-up form on the homepage.

Nope, that cute little birdie blue is not named after Larry Page or Larry King. Turns out it’s named after basketball legend Larry Bird, a famous former Boston Celtics forward. Biz Stone confirmed this fact after Celtics vice president of digital media Peter Stringer asked him about the rumored tidbit, fittingly on Twitter. His guess was a slam dunk.

On 15 January 2009, a US Airways flight crashed on NYC’s Hudson River. A photo posted to Twitter broke the news before traditional media, highlighting Twitter’s role in breaking news

11. Twitter didn’t create retweets, replies, hashtags, a mobile app or social ads—it was created by users and developers in its ecosystem. Those features were later supported by Twitter, according to marketing site 140 Proof.

Enter your full name, email address and a password. Click Sign up for Twitter.

In February 2012, Twitter announced a partnership with the Russian search engine Yandex.

#NoSeriously, it didn’t. Hashtags date back to 1988, when people communicated via chat rooms called Internet Relay Chats (IRCs). The first hashtags made their way to Twitter in 2007, when Chris Messina, formerly of Google and now a lead developer at Uber, proposed using them as a way to lump together related tweets. The simple searchable tags instantly caught on.

Twitter will automatically suggest a ‘username’ based on the name you entered on the first sign-up form. However, you can change this to a different name if you want to.

In October 2012 Twitter bought Vine, which Twitter released as a standalone app in January 2013. It was hugely successful but eventually closed down in October 2016.

Unfortunately for the inventors, they didn’t receiving a slice of the company when it went public in November 2013.

The chart-topping pop songstress has almost 85 million followers. That’s more followers than people who live in Egypt. Fellow pop sensation Justin Bieber comes in second (77 million followers) and Taylor Swift third (73 million). The most followed brand on Twitter is not Twitter. It’s YouTube (61 million followers).

In November 2013, Twitter went public with shares being valued at $26 as the market opened and at $44 when it closed.

12. Cashtags—ticker symbols accompanied by a dollar sign, like $GE—are used by Wall Street tweeters and those interested in tracking news around stocks.

If Twitter is happy with the information you have entered, a green tick will appear alongside each field. If not, a red cross will appear and prompt you to change the information you have entered.

Some Twitter users utilize the social media site to build their company brand or generate leads.

14. Twitter’s Fail Whale—used during periods of Twitter.com downtime in the site’s early years—was created by Yiying Lu, an artist who originally made the design for a birthday e-card.

Not all Silicon Valley tech startups are born in hipster bars and coffee shops. Case in point: Twitter. Dorsey says he first shared his idea for the social network on a playground slide “like a geeked-out Moses on Mount Sinai.”

There are bloggers who use the platform to share ideas and articles and to see what others are writing about. Some people check Twitter for news, while others want to see what celebrities or friends are up to.

Twitter found it on a stock photo site and added it to theirs. Sadly, the Beluga whale is no longer featured when the site goes down.

Enter a password that shouldn’t be easy to guess – avoid birthdays and your children’s names. The strength of the password entered is graded by Twitter.

If you guessed it was the comedian’s star-studded Oscar-selfie tweet, you’d be right. Actor Bradley Cooper actually snapped the viral pic at the 2014 awards show. It’s been retweeted nearly 3.4 million times since The Ellen Show first fired it off. Call us weird, but we like the Simpsons’ cool cartoon version of the pic better.