It was 2008-2009.*Twitter, which launched its 140 character revolution ten years ago this week,*was still enjoying the kind of skyrocketing user growth and fawning press coverage that startup founders pray to the Internet gods for.
"I looked at their [growth] rate and thought if this continues for 12 months or 18 months, then in a year they’re going to be bigger than us," Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and CEO, told one industry publication in 2010 about his one-time fixation with Twitter.
He was right — but only to an extent. Hundreds of millions of people created Twitter accounts only to abandon them. Twitter's user growth gradually petered out, capping at around 300 million last year. Facebook kept growing, topping the one billion mark, then passing 1.5 billion and still going. Read more...