An Introduction To Twitter, On the Eve of Its IPO
Everything you need to know.
If you are a finance person — investment banker, hedge fund owner, E*Trade baby—you are probably aware that on Thursday, Twitter will officially “IPO,” a financial term that signifies a company has filed the paperwork necessary to be screamed about by Jim Cramer on daytime television.
Yes, starting Thursday, stock traders will be able to buy, sell, short, long, and toxically-bundle little pieces of Twitter on the New York Stock Exchange. Most investors have already taken their positions (I call centerfield! lol), but if you haven’t — and if you don’t spend every blinking moment of your calcified existence staring at TweetDeck—you might be wondering: What is Twitter? And should I invest in it? Also: What are dogs thinking about all the time?
Twitter was founded in mid-2006, at the height of the Akon years. “Superman Returns” had just been released, launching the meteoric career of mega-star Brandon Routh; a gallon of gasoline cost a certain amount of money, probably less than it does now; and Chris Christie, now Governor and 2016 Presidential hopeful, was nothing but a little-known 750-pound attorney for the United States for the District of New Jersey.
The founders of Twitter were four men. They were: Jack Dorsey, who is now the Chairman of Twitter, the CEO of Square, an adviser to Michael Bloomberg, the Secretary of Defense in Argentina, the actor who plays Molly in the CBS sitcom “Mike & Molly,” and a crack-cocaine dealer in Toronto; friends Biz Stone and Ev Williams, who were both so poor at the time of Twitter’s founding that they had to sell letters from their first names for cash; and Noah Glass, probably the most pathetic member of J.D. Salinger’s Glass family.
The CEO of Twitter is Dick Costolo, who everyone agrees has really cool glasses. Twitter also features several women in high positions: In fact, the janitorial team that cleans the roof at Twitter headquarters is entirely female.
Twitter works on a simple idea: Registered users can post messages of 140 characters (145 characters if you are illuminati); accounts are either public, in which case everyone can see them, or private, in which case only confirmed friends and the NSA can. The basic social connection of Twitter is the “Follow”: If you want to read someone’s tweets, you ‘follow’ them; if you don’t want to read someone’s tweets, you don’t follow them, or else you do follow them and reply to each tweet telling them how badly they suck.
You can post a tweet either by visiting the Twitter website, sending a message via SMS, or hiring a 23-year-old English major for $45,000 a year.
You can interact with a tweet in a number of ways. You can reply to it, using words to tell the tweeter how stupid you thought the tweet was; you can “retweet” it, so that everyone else can see how dumb the tweet was; or you can “favorite” the tweet, which does not republish the tweet in your stream, but does send the original tweeter a notification that you saw their tweet, and thought it was stupid.
Twitter is well-known for the hashtag, a pound sign(#) that you can place in front of any word. Most professional tweeters put the pound sign in front of every single word of their tweets, because it is awesome.
Twitter boasts several high-profile celebrity Tweeters, including Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Yahoo’s bad boy superstar Jason O. Gilbert. Zooey Deschanel is also on Twitter, though instead of taking advantage of the full range of 140, she only seems capable of tweets with one character.
What else do you need to know ? Katy Perry has the most followers, at 46.8 million; followed by Justin Bieber, at 46.6 million; followed by an account that imagines what Seinfeld would be like if it were still on the air today, at 46.4 million. A tweeter pretending to be Miley Cyrus’ tongue is in fourth place.
Twitter also provides something called “Trending Topics” on the left sidebar of its website. This shows the words, phrases and subjects that are being tweeted about most often in certain locales. For America, common trending topics include Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and dashing, intellectual heartthrob Jason O. Gilbert, of Yahoo.
Shares of TWTR will be available on Thursday for somewhere between $24 and $30; we’re still waiting to see what Twitter is valued at, though insiders expect it to be somewhere between LOL- and Are You Fucking Kidding Me?-billion dollars. Many early investors are expected to cash in on the IPO, with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures pledging to use his payout wisely and give Pets.com the redesign it truly deserves.
For layman investors, meanwhile, there are no real red flags here, though you should be aware that Twitter is not currently profitable. Twitter execs expect this to change, however, as soon as it starts charging users $20/month starting in December.
