The Tweets That Changed Twitter

Since its birth Twitter has changed the world, and these are some of the tweets that changed Twitter.

Many conspiracy theorists believe there are 300 Illuminati members who run the world, but Twitter believers are more sure that really, 140 characters do.

Twitter's previously confidential IPO filing was revealed Thursday, a few weeks before the company is expected to go public. The S-1 form, coming in at about 223 pages including addendum, details the company's financials (it lost $69.3 million so far this year) and salient facts for potential investors (it has 215 million monthly active users, three quarters of them mobile, but only 65 percent of its revenue currently comes from mobile users). And hidden among the facts and figures in the document are some milestones for the seven-year-old microblogging platform.

In its filing Twitter highlights how "public," "real-time," and "distributed" the platform is, with tweets of Captain Sully's heroic US Airways Flight 1549 landing on the Hudson River before any news outlet had the story, Hurricane Sandy dispatches from New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and the American Red Cross, and President Barack Obama's celebratory "Four more years" after the 2012 election. The company also touts its talent for being "conversational," with a screen grab of a user getting an answer to a question about tomato sauce from both celebrity chef Mario Batali and Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale. Though that may reduce now that Twitter lets verified users chat only with each other if they so choose.

We're not going to argue that Twitter isn't a great communications medium. Quite the opposite. It's why so many of us at PCMag are on Twitter (sometimes all day) ourselves. What we are going to do is look at a few of our favorite firsts for Twitter, from its first user to reach 1 million followers (no, it's not Justin Bieber, though he now has over 45 million Beliebers hanging on to his every tweet) to the first time the Twitterverse saw a hashtag (can we undo that day?).

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The Tweets That Changed Twitter