Much like any other year, 2011 experienced major events that shook the world, whether the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East or the worldwide protests led by Occupy Wall Street.
But in 2011, microblogging service Twitter was at the epicenter of these events, broadcasting minute-to-minute updates and firsthand experiences from users to the rest of the world.
For protesters, Twitter served as a primary communicator to connect with other protesters and civilians, organize meetings and post pictures and videos of uprisings. Unfortunately, hundreds of protesters who encouraged violence via social media, or who were photographed and filmed taking part in the violence, were prosecuted.
SEE ALSO: Top 16 Tweets-Per-Second Moments of 2011 | The 21 Most Memorable Tweets of 2011Twitter also launched new upgrades and designs for its services and made several acquisitions, including web advertising company AdGrok, social analytics platform BackType and lists and interests-focused startup Bagcheck.
Unfortunately for Twitter, 2011 also brought a number of scams — from 11.6 hours to a beach body weight-loss product to the Tweeter Viewer, these scams targeted many user accounts.
Check out the gallery below to see more of Twitter’s major milestones in 2011.
View As Slideshow »January: After violence between anti-government protesters and police continued to erupt in Cairo, Egypt, the Egyptian government censored microblogging service Twitter as well as other websites.
Social media played a key role throughout Egypt's protests. First, the protests were organized through a Facebook Page, then protesters turned to Twitter to post photos, video feeds and other information about the protests, using several hashtags devoted to the revolution.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mtrommer
March: Twitter turned five and, in celebration of its birthday, the company launched a new website -- discover.twitter.com -- which features 16 prominent users from a variety of backgrounds that users can follow. The list currently includes Snoop Dog, Martha Stewart and Serena Williams.
Twitter also launched a new YouTube video of the 16 featured users discussing who they follow on the site and the value Twitter brings to their lives.
Image courtesy of Discover.twitter.com
April: Twitter extended its Local Trends feature to 70 additional cities and countries around the world, including South Africa, Jakarta, Santiago and Japan.
The feature, which has more than 100 international locations, allows users to discover which topics are trending in their region.
May: Twitter announced its acquisition of TweetDeck, a personal browser that lets users manage their social networks all on one dashboard.
“This acquisition is an important step forward for us,” Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said in a blog post. “TweetDeck provides brands, publishers, marketers and others with a powerful platform to track all the real-time conversations they care about.”
Although Twitter did not release the price of the acquisition, reports suggested the amount to be approximately $40 million.
Image courtesy of TweetDeck
May: Twitter launched a "follow" button, enabling users to subscribe to the Twitter feeds of individuals and companies directly from their external websites. The new feature has prompted website publishers to add the "follow us" link to their sites.
Prior to the "follow" button, users could only follow other Twitter users from Twitter.com.
June: Twitter has always left photos and videos to third-party services like Twitpic and Yfrog, but this year the company launched its own version that directly connects video and photos to tweets.
Twitter users can now view photos and videos without having to leave the site.
June: To allow users to access more multimedia content without leaving Twitter.com, the site integrated several new social tools, including Amazon, AOL Video, Foursquare, Plancast and Gowalla.
Now multimedia appears on Twitter whenever users tweet links from any of these sites. The company also plans to integrate other social tools in the future.
June: After surpassing 50 million tweets per day in 2010, Twitter reached a new milestone of 200 million tweets sent per day. Each second, 2,400 tweets are sent through Twitter, totaling about 1.4 billion tweets per week.
According to Twitter's calculations, the amount of tweets sent in one day is enough to write a 10 million-page book or 8,163 copies of War and Peace.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, matspersson0
July: According to reports from The Wall Street Journal, Twitter's value has almost doubled in seven months after raising hundreds of millions of dollars. At just $3.7 billion in December, Twitter's valuation skyrocketed to $7 billion by July.
The increase in valuation derives from the company's growing number of revenue streams.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, cruphoto
August: As part of its web application redesign, Twitter introduced two new features: “@[username]” and “Activity".
The @username, which replaced the mentions tab, includes tweets specifically directed at users via @replies, favorite tweets and retweeted tweets and new follow notifications.
The Activity's tab, similar to notifications in Facebook's News Feed, showcases the same activities as the @username tab but focuses more on the individuals a user follows.
September: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo revealed Twitter has 100 million active users who log in at least once a month and 50 million active users each day.
Costolo also shared that out of 200 million registered users, exactly half logs on to the microblogging service each month, which is up 82% since the beginning of 2011.
Image courtesy of Flickr, shawncampbell
September: Twitter unveiled Twitter Web Analytics, a new tool that allows users to measure the amount of traffic their websites receive from Twitter.
The tool provides website owners with more data on the effectiveness of their Twitter integration strategies.
September: Twitter expanded its service to five new languages: Hindi, Tagalog, Malay and simplified and traditional Chinese, bringing the total number of languages to 17.
Twitter also added Dutch and Indonesian to its list of languages this year.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, warchi
October: New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg joined Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in announcing the company's first official New York office, located at 340 Madison Avenue.
The office is the former address of Facebook's office in Manhattan.
December: An exciting end to 2011, Twitter introduced an entirely new look for its website, mobile apps and TweetDeck, in hopes that the new look will simplify the user experience.
The new design has moved tweets to the right side of the page and includes three new buttons at the top of the page -- Home, @Connect and #Discover. @Connect shows you who has mentioned you in a tweet and gives you suggestions of accounts to follow. #Discover shows you what is trending and directs you to important stories and videos.
In addition, Twitter unveiled embeddable tweets, which lets users embed tweets on their websites using a one-line code, and allows visitors to reply, retweet and favorite without leaving the site.
Image courtesy of Flickr, BeauGiles
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