If you spend any amount of time paring your thoughts down to 140 characters (or fewer), then you must be a member of Twitter Nation. And you're in good company, as an overwhelming number of global businesses, celebrities, athletes, charities and literally hundreds of millions of "regular folks" have launched accounts with the wildly popular site. In 2010, NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer posted the first-ever tweet in the cosmos from the International Space Station. Last year, Hillary Clinton caused a stir when she started tweeting, listing "author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado" among her various job titles. Clearly, a great deal of Twitter activity is about entertainment, but it also speaks to the ways that social media is redefining how professionals and companies connect with their target audiences. As a result, Twitter now commands more than $315 million in annual revenue, and its stock (trading on the New York Stock Exchange with the symbol, TWTR) has climbed from its November initial public offering of $26 a share to more than $56 per share in mid-February. Given that Twitter is now firmly established as a mainstay of digital culture, we thought you'd enjoy reading these 12 little-known facts about the company.