About five years ago when you searched the word “trending” on the Google search engine you would likely get a list of definitions. If you do the search today, you’ll be highly likely to find the word Twitter a few times in your results.

Twitter is a microblogging service created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey as a way to send short text messages (known as “tweets”) to a group of people over the internet. Microblogging wasn’t very popular until Twitter (and Tumblr) were created and now we even have microblogs for university courses! It’s popularity has increased dramatically over the years; in 2007, there was about 5,000 tweets per day and it rose to 50 million per day in 2010.

Like other free social networking websites, raising funds to pay all the costs can be difficult if one doesn’t consider allowing outside advertising which led Twitter to offer paid advertising for companies such as Starbucks. However, Twitter has been able to raise more than $50 million from venture capitalist funding (which is money invested into a high-risk and usually new company) and may have an initial public offering in 2013.

Tweets may be limited to 140 characters, but Twitter’s growth still hasn’t found a limit.

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