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It was Glass who came up with the original name Twttr in a reference to chirping birds. (The two vowels were added later.) On March 21, 2006, Dorsey posted the world's first tweet: "Just setting up my twttr." Glass posted the same words just 10 minutes later. By 2007, Twitter was incorporated with Dorsey as the original CEO and Williams as chairman. Dorsey and Williams would eventually swap roles. Both remain major shareholders, though neither runs the company. Dick Costolo, a former Google executive and once an aspiring stand-up comedian, is now CEO. Despite his early involvement in Twitter, Glass was never promoted as one of the company's founders along with Dorsey, Stone and Williams. Glass, though, proudly boasts of his role on a Twitter account that he rarely uses. His Twitter profile states: "I started this." Perhaps Twitter's greatest appeal is that it allows users to see news unfold in real time. People can follow and even communicate with newsmakers. And they can witness history. In 2009, Twitter became an essential communication tool in Iran as the country's government cracked down on traditional media after a disputed presidential election. Tech-savvy Iranians took to Twitter to organize protests. As the events unfolded, they used the service to send messages and pictures to the outside world. Twitter played a similar role in the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and other countries. Today, a billion tweets are sent every t2 1/2 days. To be fair, most tweets don't comprise the world's weightiest matters. They are ruminations about lunch, the weather and Justin Bieber
-- and occasionally they involve career-crashing missteps of the Anthony Weiner sort. Like Facebook, Twitter reaps most of its revenue from advertising. Research firm eMarketer estimates that Twitter will generate $582.8 million in worldwide ad revenue this year, up from $288.3 million in 2012. While companies are flocking to Twitter to woo consumers, not all of them are convinced of its usefulness. More than 60 percent of U.S. marketers use Twitter, according to Forrester Research analyst Nate Elliott, but he says they are not "fully satisfied with the results." Twitter, he says, still needs to improve the way it targets advertisements to users and it needs to find more types of ads to sell. Still, by 2015, eMarketer expects Twitter's annual ad revenue to hit $1.33 billion.
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