The modern seatbelt was created by Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin in 1959. At that time, seat belts were simple two-point waist restraints, and in crashes they often did more harm than good.
Volvo gave away the patent for their most important invention
In the early decades of the automobile industry, safety was just an afterthought. In those days, Volvo built their reputation on selling safer cars, but they gave away the most important safety device ever invented: the three-point seat belt.
The design was first launched in the Nordic market in 1959 on the Volvo Amazon and Volvo PV544. It made its way to the U.S. in 1963.
But Volvo didn’t do that — they gave the patent away because they decided it was too important to keep to themselves. They decided that the invention was so significant, it had more value as a free life saving tool than something to profit from.
So if you’ve ever had your life saved by a three-point seat belt, you have Bohlin to thank for it, and maybe also Volvo for putting human lives ahead of corporate profits. It was a revolutionary invention, and one that probably could have netted Volvo a fortune on patents alone.
1. Twitter almost never came to be. In 2006, there was a company called Odeo, which helped individuals publish audio. With a lack of growth and investors souring, the company pivoted and decided to conduct a hackathon one day. This brain-storming competition led to the birth of Twitter.
2. This was Twitter’s first ever homepage. The site opened to the public on July 15, 2006.
3. Twitter was created on a playground. Founding team member Dom Sagolla says the group went on the top of a slide at a playground in South Park, a small neighborhood in San Francisco, and Jack Dorsey discussed an “idea so simple that you don’t even think about it—you just write.” This moment of inspiration has turned into a multibillion-dollar company.
4. When Twitter began, everyone’s first tweet was automated. It published, “Just setting up my twttr.” Co-founder Dorsey sent the first tweet—beating Biz Stone by a minute—on March 21, 2006, at 4:50 p.m. PT. It now has more than 50,000 retweets.
5. The user with the most followers is Katy Perry; the singer has nearly 67 million followers.
6. HootSuite, a social media management company, follows 1.6 million accounts, the second most of any user. @ArabicBest is in the lead; the profile shows it follows 2.4 million accounts.
7. Who has tweeted the most? That honor belongs to @Yougakduan_00, a girl from Japan, who posted a mind-boggling 36,402,262 tweets before Twitter suspended her account, likely because of the excessive tweeting.
8. The most followed brand is YouTube with 49 million followers.
9. The official name of Twitter’s bird is Larry. Yes, his name is Larry Bird. The iconic little fellow—seen in Twitter’s logo shown in TV commercials, print ads and practically every website—was named after Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird.
10. Why choose to name the bird after a basketball star who played in Boston? It may have to do with Twitter co-founder Stone growing up in Massachusetts.
11. Twitter didn’t create retweets, replies, hashtags, a mobile app or social ads—it was created by users and developers in its ecosystem. Those features were later supported by Twitter, according to marketing site 140 Proof. Unfortunately for the inventors, they didn’t receiving a slice of the company when it went public in November 2013.
12. Cashtags—ticker symbols accompanied by a dollar sign, like $GE—are used by Wall Street tweeters and those interested in tracking news around stocks.
13. From 2008 to 2010, Twitter had a “guy with a pager” to help keep the site online. “It sucked,” writes John Adams, a member of the company’s security team, on Quora. The pager rotated between three and four people, Adams says.
14. Twitter’s Fail Whale during periods of Twitter. It’s what’s happening downtime in the site’s early years—was created by Yiying Lu, an artist who originally made the design for a birthday e-card. Twitter found it on a stock photo site and added it to theirs. Sadly, the Beluga whale is no longer featured when the site goes down.
15, The Fail Whale was adored by thousands of Twitter users. Some made cakes showcasing the whale, others sported permanent tattoos. One fan even created a fictitious beer.
16. Twitter was almost called Twitch. Before finalizing on the name, the team looked at the Oxford English Dictionary. “We found the word Twitter,” Dorsey says. “And Twitter means a short inconsequential burst of information, chirps from birds. And we were like, that describes exactly what we’re doing here.”
17. When the founding team was building the product, it called it “Jitter” at one point. It was a “terrible” name, Dorsey says.
18. The founding team was nervous about using Twitter as the company name “because in certain cultures it could be demeaning,” Dorsey explains. “For example, Twit is not necessarily associated with the best things.” It took two months or so for the team to get used to the name.
19. Once the name Twitter was decided on, the crew realized phones were such a big part of what it was doing, and that meant Twitter needed a five-letter “short code” for folks to send messages on a mobile device. “So [we] took out all the vowels and then it could be twttr,” Dorsey says. Unfortunately, the short code was already taken by Teen People. The vowels were then added back.
20. Twitter paid a “minuscule” amount for Twitter. It’s what’s happening., Dorsey says. Before Twitter purchased the domain in 2006 from someone else, there was nothing going on at the page.
21. Twitter didn’t want to refer to posts on its site as “tweets.” After insisting on “status update” for some time, the company caved and used “tweets” after users insisted on the term. “I thought it was a little bit too cute for such a serious utility,” Dorsey says.
22. The length of the messages users send on Twitter has gotten shorter over the last five years, researchers say. Do people have less time on their hands with the growing number of social media services and users or does new Twitter jargon allow users to keep it concise? You decide.
23. Ending a tweet with an empty hashtag is called a hangtag, and it’s Twitter’s version of the mic drop, the team at Medium declared recently.
24. Dorsey was reportedly brokenhearted when Instagram was sold to Facebook for $1 billion in cash and stock in April 2012. Less than a year later, Twitter scooped up Vine, the video-sharing app, for $30 million.
25. Dorsey hasn’t posted to his Instagram account ever since Facebook acquired the service.
26. Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom (@Kevin) has tweeted just one time since August 2012.
27. Why was Twitter’s video-sharing app named Vine? A source says it’s short for Vignette, which is defined as “a short impressionistic scene.” Vignette is also the name of a photo filter offered by the signature Twitter app.
28. Vine limits its videos to six seconds, but Twitter user Will Smidlein once figured out how to upload a three-minute music video to a single Vine clip. On the same day Twitter released Vine on Android, Smidlein (@ws) exploited a hole in the video app’s coding that allowed him to share the ever-viral “Rickroll” YouTube video in its entirety. The bug was later patched, but not before Smidlein says he “ruined some poor engineer’s day.”
29. Vine’s logo connects the “V” and “I” in its name in the same way a vine loops and wraps itself around a tree.
30. If you turn Vine’s logo upside down, it displays the maximum number of seconds your video can be: 6.
31. While most social networks’ most followed users are superstars in the real world, Vine’s most followed users are a dozen of your everyday folks. One such Vine star is Nicholas Megalis, who was the first user to post a clip that hit 1,000,000 likes.
32. Because Vine didn’t give users basic editing tools at the start, some Viners spent hours on a single six-second clip. Top Vine user Meagan Cignoli says she spent five hours and three shirts on this video.
33. Twitter announced its IPO via a tweet, naturally. At 5 p.m. ET on Sept. 12, 2013, @Twitter posted: “We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.” The tweet now has more than 14,000 retweets.
34. Twitter’s stock symbol is TWTR. Some investors thought it was TWTRQ, which belongs to Tweeter’s Home Entertainment, a penny stock. The confusion led to TWTRQ jumping as much as 2,200 percent on Oct. 4, 2013. The stock gave back all of its gains within a couple of days, and the company changed the symbol to THEGQ.
35. Twitter, the company, recommends following three accounts for information on its stock: @DickC, @Twitter and @TwitterIR.
36. Three years, two months and one day: The time it took from the first tweet to the billionth tweet.
37. You can find your first ever tweet at Discover your first Tweet.
38. @Twitter didn’t send its first tweet until the service was 478 days old.
39. The service sees more than 500 million tweets a day now.
40. Three of the five richest people in the world have a verified Twitter account. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison have a combined $206.2 billion, according to Forbes, and are all sending 140-character messages.
41. The social networking site has 288 million monthly active users, but the number of registered accounts is much higher. There are more than 2 billion registered Twitter accounts, according to Twopcharts.
42. When users want to manually retweet a tweet, they use the letters “RT” before the post. If the tweet is modified, users type “MT” for “modified tweet.”
43. Twitter (288 million) has 1 billion fewer monthly active users than Facebook (1.39 billion) has.
44. The microblogging service pulled in $1.4 billion in revenue in 2014, compared with $12.47 billion for Facebook.
45. 80% of Twitter’s 288 monthly active users access the service on a mobile device.
46. Twitter’s fourth co-founder Noah Glass was kicked out of the company, according to the book “Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal,” by Nick Bilton of The New York Times. Glass is said to have made almost no money from Twitter’s IPO, according to Bilton.
47. Glass has only tweeted five times over the last five years. His bio reads, “I started this.”
48. The “unfollow” button was almost called “leave.”
49. Twitter was thinking about creating a feature called “worship” in the early days. “If you worshipped someone, you would get every single one of their messages,” Dorsey says. “The full fire hose of what they’re saying.” The idea was ditched.
50. Dorsey thinks users should have the option to follow just certain tweets from specific users. Since User 1 may follow User 2 for a specific topic, receiving just the tweets pertaining to that topic should be available. The issue? “Being able to surface valuable information immediately … is a really, really hard problem.”
51. Frequent Twitter users are more likely male and under the age of 35, a CNBC-AP poll showed in November 2013. Nearly a third of Americans at the time said they use Twitter.
52. Facebook tried buying Twitter—twice, according to Bilton. Each time, Twitter pushed the “dislike” button.
53. While seemingly everyone on planet Earth is on Twitter, there are certain celebrities that have yet to take the plunge. Athletes like Derek Jeter and Michael Jordan don’t use Twitter. “I’m not a Twitterer, I’m not a twerker, I’m not a Facebooker. I am a … nothin’ … I’m old school.” Jordan told NBA 2K14.
54. Twitter limits users to 140 characters per post, but in an April Fool’s blog post in 2013, the company said it will allow folks to pay for an extra character in a bidding war. “There is no option to purchase a second additional character at this time,” Twitter wrote.
55. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has a 89 percent approval rating by employees on Glassdoor.
56. Why are posts limited to 140 characters? Twitter was born as an SMS phone service designed to fit its character limit.
57. The International Space Station has its highest number of tweeting astronauts right now.
58. The hashtag was created by a Twitter user. In August 2007, @ChrisMessina tweeted, “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?” He is now referred to as “The Hashtag Godfather.”
59. The Twitter IPO minted 1,600 new millionaires, according to financial analysis firm PrivCo.
60. Three billionaires were created from Twitter’s IPO: Dorsey, Evan Williams and Peter Fenton, a general partner at Benchmark Capital.
61. The New York Times once drew up comical new ways for the social media company to cash in.
62. While Twitter is still a relatively young platform, there have been plenty of public scandals on the service.
63. Twitter reaches more users than any other social network in Japan, comScore says.
64. Twitter doesn’t work in China, nor does Facebook. People in China can access LinkedIn.
65. The cost of a Promoted Trend in the United States for one day is $200,000.
66. Twitter gave the city of Boston a promoted trend (#OneBoston) free of charge after the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013.
67. In the 38 days leading up to the bombings, Twitter sold 29 promoted trends, according to tracking by CNBC, for a success rate of 76.3 percent. In the week after the incident, Twitter did not feature a single paid advertiser’s promoted trend. It may signal that advertisers want to avoid juxtaposing their messages alongside bad news.
68. Costolo said any team inside Twitter can launch any test to 1 percent of users without any approvals.
69. An angel investor says Twitter will all users to pay to be verified.
70. Twitter acquired Twitpic just hours before the photo-sharing service was to be shut down in October 2014.
71. The most retweeted tweet ever came from Ellen DeGeneres in March 2014. The star-studded selfie tweet at the Oscars produced 3.4 million retweets.
72. Before Ellen’s viral tweet, the most retweeted tweet belonged to President @BarackObama on election night in 2012. It had about 800,000 retweets.
73. “I was aiming to break your record of retweets,” DeGeneres told Obama later in the month, “and I broke your record.” How did the president respond? “I heard about that. I thought it was a pretty cheap stunt myself, getting a bunch of celebrities in the background.” DeGeneres later referred to Obama as “the leader of the free world and the runner up in retweet records.”
74. Samsung, the maker of the device Ellen used to create Twitter history, said it was donating $3 million to charity in honor of Ellen’s 3 million retweets.
75. The number of accounts that have been verified as authentic—those with a blue badge—is more than 127,000. Quietly, most of Twitter’s active users may tell you they would want to be Twitter-verified, too.
76. Twitter launched verified accounts after former St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa complained about a user pretending to be him.
77. There’s an unwritten rule at the company that employees can’t be verified.
78. Twitter’s @NathanCHubbard (head of commerce) had to give up his verification badge when he joined the flock. “Think I’m the first to proactively opt out of the blue check mark,” Hubbard tweeted.
79. Mark Zuckerberg (@finkd)—also not verified—has 330,000 followers but has only tweeted 19 times and just once since March 2009. One shouldn’t expect Facebook’s CEO to begin tweeting religiously anytime soon.
80. The first user to hit 1 million followers was Ashton Kutcher, beating out CNN in a race that was broadcast in a live stream from Kutcher’s home.
81. Twitter has 3600 employees. Want to hear something wild? 50 percent of all employees are engineers.
82. Twitter’s mobile app has different features than its Web service. On mobile, users can save drafts, while visitors on Web can’t save unpublished posts.
83. Retweets are the new dare. Users will occasionally perform wild stunts (e.g., run on to playing field at game) if their posts receives a certain amount of retweets.
84. How is Twitter different than other social networks? This graphic will answer that.
85. Police in Granada have Twitter handles on their uniforms.
86. Five years ago, Twitter saw its defining moment when US Airways Flight 1549 touched down in the frigid waters of the Hudson River. In that “miraculous” moment, an eyewitness to the event caught the world’s attention by posting a photo on Twitter. It showed that Twitter had transformed the way we can get the news.
87. Tweets with hashtags receive 2x engagement than those without hashtags, yet only 24 percent of measured tweets contain hashtags.
88. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who signed up for the service in 2013, does most of his public talking these days via Twitter. Sometimes, in the form of poetry.
89. Three of Icahn’s tweets moved a reported $18 billion in Apple stock.
90. Hackers compromised the @AP twitter account in April 2013, sending out a fake tweet about an attack at the White House that resulted in a brief market plunge. The tweet was broadcast to nearly 2 million followers before it was deleted.
91. Want a viral tweet? You can pay for it! Sites like Fiverr offer thousands of retweets from bots for as little as $5.
92. Twitter is said to be “the king of the second screen,” as users often flock to the service during big events. The power outage at Super Bowl XLVII shined light on an ever-growing issue for Facebook: its lack of relevancy during a live event.
93. MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson (remember MySpace?) used Twitter to completely obliterate a follower in a jaw-dropping reply.
94. Speaking of awesome comebacks, Boone Pickens’ reply to singer Drake was deemed one of the “10 greatest tweets of all time” by Yahoo Finance.
95. Want to track your Twitter stats? Check your own Twitter Stats – Twitter Counter receives more than 2 million views a month from folks hungry to track follower counts, Top 100 lists and more.
96. Celebrities use the platform very differently than you and I. Seth MacFarlane recently joked that he feels pressure to post humorous content. “In the beginning, you’re like, ‘A joke a day? That’s fun. And then you’re like, ‘Oh s—, a joke a day—and for free!’
97. You can send a friend a Starbucks coffee with a single tweet.
98. When tweeting a photo, the ideal picture size is 2×1 (e.g., 1000×500). This will ensure the full photo automatically displays in-stream.
99. Apple has more than 12 million Twitter followers when combining the tech giant’s several accounts.
100. Facebook is on Twitter; Twitter is on Facebook. Twitter has 15.3 million Facebook fans, while Facebook has 13.9 million Twitter followers.
The Invisible Pink Unicorn was “revealed to” the Usenet newsgroup alt.atheism in 1990.
The Invisible Pink Unicorn (IPU) is the goddess of a parody religion used to satirize atheistic beliefs
Since then, she’s acquired all the trappings of a real deity: gospels (“according to St. Sascha”), revelations (to “St. Bryce the Long-Winded”), relics (the Holy Sock of Bob), scripture, and historic artworks.
“Invisible Pink Unicorn is beings of great spiritual power. We know this because unicorns are capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorn is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can’t see them.”
Nowadays, the Invisible Pink Unicorn has become a metaphor to depict atheists, for it is some kind of spearhead that is used as an illustration of the problem faced by atheists when asked to disprove the existence of a god by those of a religious persuasion.
Followers debate her attributes, but it’s generally agreed that she prefers pineapple and ham pizza to pepperoni and mushroom, which is said to be eaten only by followers of the Purple Oyster of Doom. The IPU also “raptures” socks from laundry as a sign of favor.
Is this harmless fun or awful blasphemy? It’s getting hard to care. As the French writer Edmond de Goncourt wrote, “If there is a God, atheism must seem to him as less of an insult than religion.”
This “Religion”, since its creation, has gathered many followers.
Starting around 2001, websites dedicated to that myth have been created:
