Nifty

Nifty may refer to:

the Nifty Erotic Stories Archive, an online repository of alternative (including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender) erotica

Nifty Fifty, a colloquial term for the strong earning blue chip stocks on the New York Stock Exchange in the 1970s

CNX Nifty, an index for large cap stocks on the National Stock Exchange of India

National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship

@nifty, a Japanese internet service provider

Noninvasive Fetal Trisomy, method of prenatal diagnosis

Twitter

Twitter (/ˈtwɪtər/) is an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called "tweets".

Registered users can read and post tweets, but those who are unregistered can only read them. Users access Twitter through the website interface, SMS or mobile device app. Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco and has more than 25 offices around the world.

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass and launched in July 2006. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with more than 100 million users posting 340 million tweets a day in 2012. The service also handled 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, Twitter was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet". As of May 2015, Twitter has more than 500 million users, out of which more than 332 million are active.

History

Creation and initial reaction

Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, then an undergraduate student at New York University, introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The decision was also partly due to the fact that domain twitter.com was already in use, and it was six months after the launch of twttr that the crew purchased the domain and changed the name of the service to Twitter. The developers initially considered "10958" as a short code, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability". Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): "just setting up my twttr". Dorsey has explained the origin of the "Twitter" title:

Nifty Fifty

Nifty Fifty refers to the 50 popular large-cap stocks on the New York Stock Exchange in the 1960s and 1970s that were widely regarded as solid buy and hold growth stocks.

The fifty are credited with propelling the bull market of the early 1970s. Most are still solid performers, although a few are now defunct or otherwise worthless.

The long bear market of the 1970s that lasted until 1982 caused valuations of the nifty fifty to fall to low levels along with the rest of the market, with most of these stocks under-performing the broader market averages. A notable exception was Wal-Mart, the best performing stock on the list, with a 29.65% compounded annualized return over a 29-year period.

Because of the under-performance of most of the nifty fifty list, it is often cited as an example of unrealistic investor expectations for growth stocks. However, those who held on until the late 1990s bull market saw many of the stocks return to correct valuations.

Characteristics

The stocks were often described as "one-decision", as they were viewed as extremely stable, even over long periods of time.