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When the world tweeted the power of 140

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CIOL Bureau
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Now on the threshold of 2010, the world stands to miss a host of heroic moments that added color and gaiety to 2009.

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The most notable among them was the discovery of unparalleled “power of the 140 characters” that extended their wings to places ranging from celebrity bedrooms to the power corridors to the dark alleys of terrorists, underworld dons and jailbreak fugitives.

From school kids to ministers were glued to this platform and did no longer try to hold back their personal opinion on anything under the sun. Our own Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor has fallen in hot soup more than once due to his fascination for tweets.

Tharoor's latest tweet against visa rules made his boss SM Krishna to make a public statement that, “The business of government is much too serious to be tweeted about.” And the ghost of the 'cattle class' tweet is still haunting the minister.

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Nobel Peace Prize for Twitter?

In June,Twitter took up the cudgels for democracy in Iran by helping document the crisis there, following the contested presidential election results. When journalists and media were shooed away by the government, the microblogging donned the attire of the media and facilitated 220,000 Iran tweets per hour during the peak time of political unrest there.

This remarkable feat, made Mark Pfeifle, the former aide for George W Bush, to say that “Twitter and its creators are worthy of being considered for the Nobel Peace Prize.”

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The height of weirdness

The platform provided room not only for sober matters, but some extremely weird phenomena also. Besides human users, it had animals with big fan following. A cat named Sockington with its hilarious looking posts in the meow language, became an instant celebrity with over half a million followers.

When users started behaving in weird ways, Twitter decided to promote such behaviors officially, then followed the birth of a concept which allowed the users to talk to the dead. Tweeters were invited to submit questions for the spirits of departed celebrities like Michael Jackson as part of the world's first Twitter séance.

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As the word 'tweet' got popular and popular by the day, the company founders' business mind took to some clever tracks. They filed an application with U.S. Patent and Trademark Office requesting trademark registration for the word 'tweet' but the wish turned stillborn as the officials rejected the application.

There were instances where celebrities using the platform to gain mileage in their field. Remember, Twitter was a major platform for US President Barack Obama during his electoral campaign. And after the elections (and also winning Nobel Peace prize for raising the hope of peace), one fine morning he declared that he had never used Twitter. Thud!

The site also offered its users plenty of chances to make money on the site. Reality TV star Kim Kardashian was reportedly adjudged as the highest-paid celebrity Twitter user in the world, according to a recent survey by Ad.ly, an online service.

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The TV star with 2.7 million followers said to earn around $10,000 (£6,250) per post on the micro-blogging service.

Also there are corporate entities, which get benefits from the microblogging site, by promoting their products. PC maker Dell had reportedly earned $6.5 million in sales of PCs, accessories, and software, thanks to promotions on Twitter.

Despite all this hyperactivity surrounding it, the company remained penniless as it had not evolved a concrete business model.

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Reaching economic salvation?

Now at the end of 2009, the site seems to have hatched up various plans to take to the track of profitability, with investors' backing. The acquisition in December of Mixer Labs, the creators of GeoAPI, a service for helping developers build geolocation-aware applications, can be looked at as a move that may partly help it in evolving a revenue model. Twitter had acquired search engine Summize in 2008.

The new acquisition is expected to help the tweeters identify the location of events that are tweeted on. This location data can later be used to reach targeted audiences to promote goods and services.

Twitter has already struck Internet-search deals with Google and Microsoft to make the micro-blogging service searchable on the Internet. The multi-year deals are expected to fetch the site $25 million in total, allowing it to make a small profit in 2009.

Of course, the entrepreneur trio, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, behind the microblogging sensation would not term 2009 as the year of recession, at least in terms of Twitter's popularity!

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