Seven years ago, in a small San Francisco office -- a little bird hatched, a little bird that took over the world.
It became news when Oprah Winfrey sent her first tweet on her show and when President Barack Obama became the first president to live tweet. But never before was so much said with so little.
The walls of Twitter's palatial new headquarters are littered with magazine covers, chronicling Twitter's impact on society. From the first images of the plane in the Hudson River, to the first tweet from space, the images help remind the people who work there that this is actually real.
"What's happening on Twitter continues to amaze me. You see people meeting their spouses, starting revolutions," said Twitter spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo.
Filadelfo recalls how Twitter was used to organize a protest in a train station around the corner and an uprising in Egypt, halfway around the world:
"Twitter has always found free speech and free expression to be really important to the work we're doing," said Filadelfo.
And so it is with the people of Twitter. You won't find any dress codes here. Some work standing up, some work lying down, and they all work together. Many celebrated Twitter's seventh birthday with a cupcake.
Seven years in, Twitter certainly has plenty to celebrate. From a small office to an expansive building on San Francisco's Market Street, they've gone from hundreds of tweets to hundreds of millions of tweets every day.
Seven years ago, there was no such thing as a hash tag.
"The hashtag was first introduced by a user," said Filadelfo. "Even the retweet was again started by members of the community."
Now, just about everything has a hashtag and though once a novice, Obama knows all about being retweeted. Obama's victory photo of him hugging his wife with the words, "Four more years" was the top retweeted photo ever.
Now online in 30 languages, Twitter is also a language of its own. But global as it may be, one look at Twitter's headquarters shows it hasn't lost its funky, independent, San Francisco roots.
"It's undeniable that San Francisco is part of our DNA, part of our blood," said Filadelfo.
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