Twitter said Thursday that it filed the initial paperwork for its long-awaited initial public offering of stock. It made the announcement on Twitter, naturally:
The company filed its preliminary prospectus, known as an S-1, with securities regulators using a provision of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups, or JOBS Act, that allows a company to keep its initial filings confidential if it has less than $1 billion in annual revenue.
And immediately, reaction came pouring out on Twitter, including about how the announcement was made.
The percentage of Internet users on Twitter has more than doubled since November 2010, according to the Pew Research Center, and many of the service’s approximately 200 million users worldwide turned to its platform to react to the news, sometimes expressing excitement, other times leveling criticism.
Om Malik, a technologist and founder of the technology blog GigaOm, wrote in 2006 about Twitter’s increasing popularity in Silicon Valley, something he referred to as a side project that was addicting in its simplicity.
Some Twitter users commented on the timing of the announcement, noting that it came a day after Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, said during the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that the process of an initial offering was daunting but that he now thinks that he might have waited too long to take Facebook public.
Because so much information about the public offering is confidential, it was hard to judge how successful the effort might be. But that didn’t stop Twitter users from wondering how the I.P.O. would play out on Twitter itself.
