10 years of Twitter: The tweets that changed lives

en years after Jack Dorsey launched Twitter with the words "just setting up my twttr", the micro-blogging site has become a feature of millions of people's lives - but for some it has been life changing.

Sumita Dalmia met her partner Anuj on Twitter

From a 140-character marriage proposal to inspiring a revolution from the comfort of a sofa, people have been sharing their stories to mark 10 years of Twitter. When American Greg Rewis was thinking of an unusual way to propose to his then girlfriend Stephanie, he decided to tweet her after she had turned him down on a private messaging service.

Stephanie and Greg Rewis married in 2009 after he proposed on Twitter

"The proposal started as a joke" he told BBC News. "I was talking to Steph on an instant messenger and asked her if she wanted to marry me. She said that I had never asked her in a proper way. So I posted on Twitter and told her to refresh her feed. It simply looked like it was the right moment.

Sumita Dalmia was surprised when her boyfriend used the social media platform to arrange their engagement

"It was quite a shock when I found out that this was the first proposal on Twitter. Had we known it was the first time, we would have made it more impressive. I would have planned everything way better."We now live together and split our time between Phoenix and California, but I have to travel a lot for work. We still use Twitter to stay in touch and actually we live-tweeted our wedding a year after the proposal in 2009."


'I met my husband on Twitter'

"He had already given up his ticket but his biography on Twitter caught my attention because he works in sports and entertainment, which is a field I was very much interested in getting into.
"We started chatting and tweeting turned into direct messaging and then emailing, and then texting, and phone calls, and then we met in person. The rest is history I guess!"

Marwa Mammoon used Twitter to find a new career after the Egyptian revolution in 2011

In September 2013, Anuj arranged an elaborate proposal for Sumita which was Twitter themed. After sending her on a treasure hunt around Atlanta by sending her tweets, Anuj got down on one knee on a helicopter landing pad in the centre of the city, holding a large Tweet poster asking her to marry him.

During the 2015 UK general election, 18-year-old Abby Tomlinson, from Merseyside, helped to create the hashtag #Milifandom after she felt the then Labour leader Ed Miliband was not getting fairly treated by the press.
"I decided that I wanted to play an active role and my admiration for Ed Miliband started," she said.
The hashtag soon became the number one Twitter trend in the UK and unveiled a cult following for Miliband. It didn't help his fortunes in the election but it has changed Abby's life.

"The next day, a couple more news organisation got in touch and wrote articles and I started doing interviews. Then a couple of weeks later, Ed rang me up to thank me.

"I would say Twitter changed my life in a way because it helped me decide what I wanted to do. I was always interested in politics and I've always enjoyed writing, but this gave me a chance to write for prestigious media outlets.