NEW YORK – Twitter can celebrate its fifth anniversary Monday by looking at continued user growth, but the tech company still doesn’t own the trademark for the word “tweet.”
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent the world’s first message via the firm’s micro-blogging service on March 21, 2006.
The company now has 200 million users, including celebrities and other entertainment industry figures, and fields 140 million tweets on a typical day, or more than 1,600 every second, according to CNN.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected Twitter’s trademark application, arguing that the word “tweet” was too similar to the already-registered phrase “Let Your Ad Meet Tweets,” which belongs to advertising service Twittad, according to the New York Daily News.
Twittad founder James Eliason told the paper that Twitter expressed “concern” over the trademark and “wanted us to assign our trademark to them.” He argued that his company acquired the trademark in 2008 “well before the word ‘tweet’ became widely used in the Twitter ecosystem,” but added that Twittad would be willing to consider a deal.
