Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets . Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers . Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service itself costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.
The 140-character limit on message length was initially set for compatibility with SMS messaging, and has brought to the web the kind of shorthand notation and slang commonly used in SMS messages. The 140 character limit has also spurred the usage of URL shortening services such as tinyurl, bit.ly and tr.im, and content hosting services, such as Twitpic and NotePub to accommodate multimedia content and text longer than 140 characters.
Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet" since the use of Twitter's application programming interface for sending and receiving short text messages by other applications often eclipses the direct use of Twitter.
What we have to do is deliver to people the best and freshest most relevant information possible. We think of Twitter as it's not a social network, but it's an information network. It tells people what they care about as it is happening in the world.— Evan WilliamsTwitter emphasized their news and information network strategy in November 2009 by changing the question it asks users for status updates from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?". Twitter is ranked as one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide by Alexa's web traffic analysis. Although estimates of the number of daily users vary because the company does not release the number of active accounts, a February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranked Twitter as the third most used social network based on their count of 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits. In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing site in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had a monthly growth of 1,382 percent, Zimbio of 240 percent, followed by Facebook with an increase of 228 percent. However, only 40 percent of Twitter's users are retained.
History
Twitter began in a "daylong brainstorming session" that was held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo in an attempt to break out of a creative slump. At that meeting Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group, a concept partly inspired by the SMS group messaging service TXTMob.
The working name was just "Status" for a while. It actually didn’t have a name. We were trying to name it, and mobile was a big aspect of the product early on ... We liked the SMS aspect, and how you could update from anywhere and receive from anywhere.We wanted to capture that in the name — we wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word "twitch," because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But "twitch" is not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word "twitter," and it was just perfect. The definition was "a short burst of inconsequential information," and "chirps from birds." And that’s exactly what the product was.
— Jack DorseyThe original product name or codename for the service was twttr , inspired by Flickr and the fact that American SMS short codes are five characters. The developers initially experimented with "10958″ as a short code, though 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".
The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees, later launching publicly into a full-scale version in July 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all of its assets—including Odeo.com and Twitter.com—from the investors and other shareholders. Twitter later spun off into its own company in April 2007.
The tipping point for Twitter's popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. During the event usage went from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. "The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages," remarked Newsweek' s Steven Levy. "Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it. Soon everyone was buzzing and posting about this new thing that was sort of instant messaging and sort of blogging and maybe even a bit of sending a stream of telegrams." Reaction at the festival was overwhelmingly positive. Laughing Squid blogger Scott Beale said Twitter "absolutely rul" SXSW. Social software researcher Danah Boyd said Twitter "own" the festival. Twitter staff accepted their prize for the festival's Web Award with the remark "we'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"
Finances
In total, Twitter has raised over US$57 million from venture capitalists. The exact amounts of funding have not been publicly released. Twitter's first round of funding was for an undisclosed amount that is rumored to have been between $1 million and $5 million. Its B round of funding in 2008 was for $22 million and its C round of funding in 2009 was for $35 million from Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital along with an undisclosed amount from other investors including Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and Insight Venture Partners. Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions.
The Industry Standard has remarked that Twitter's long-term viability is limited by a lack of revenue. Twitter board member Todd Chaffee forecast that the company could make money from e-commerce noting that many users may want to buy items directly from Twitter since they already use it to get product recommendations and since companies already use it to promote products.
Some of Twitter's documents covering revenue and user growth were published on TechCrunch after they were retrieved by a hacker. These contained internal projections that in 2009 they would have revenues of $400,000 in the third quarter (Q3) and $4 million in the fourth quarter (Q4) along with 25 million users at the end of the year. The projections for the end of 2013 were $1.54 billion in revenue, $111 million in net earnings, and 1 billion users. No information about how Twitter plans to achieve those numbers has been published. Biz Stone published a blog post suggesting legal action for revealing the details was a possibility.
Technology
Twitter has been described as akin to a Web-based Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client. The Twitter Web interface uses the Ruby on Rails framework, deployed on a Ruby Enterprise Edition rather than a vanilla Ruby implementation for performance reasons.
From the spring of 2007 until 2008 the actual messages were handled by a Ruby persistent queue server called Starling but since 2009 this has been gradually replaced with software written in Scala. The service's API allows other web services and applications to integrate with Twitter. Searches on the system make use of hashtags , words or phrases prefixed with a
#. A search for "beer" would turn up all messages that included#beer. Similarly, the@sign followed by a username allows users to send messages directly to each other. A message with@examplewould be directed at the user "example" although it can still be read by anyone.Through SMS, users can communicate with Twitter through five gateway numbers: short codes for the United States, Canada, India, New Zealand, and an Isle of Man-based number for international use. There is also a short code in the United Kingdom which is only accessible to those on the Vodafone and O2 networks.
Interface
Technology author Steven Johnson describes the basic mechanics of Twitter as "remarkably simple:"
As a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers. When you choose to follow another Twitter user, that user's tweets appear in reverse chronological order on your main Twitter page. If you follow 20 people, you'll see a mix of tweets scro
MoreMedia Direct Media Buying
The MoreMedia Direct, Inc. Network has locations throughout the US and Mexico located near the headquarters of nearly every major retailer. With Miami being the main office ...
Bradford Direct Inc.
Bradford Direct Inc. ... Web Hosting powered by Network Solutions®
Network Direct Inc.
The fact that we are a leader in membership services gives us the opportunity to offer a variety of savings in travel and shopping, which has made ...
Network Direct, Inc. - Call Center Outsourcing Exp
Network Direct, Inc. - Call Center Outsourcing Experts ... People A team of highly experienced call center professionals who average over 22 years of senior management experience ...
Network Direct, Inc. - Call Center Outsourcing Experts: People
The NDI team includes a diverse and talented group of in-house and affiliate professionals, working together to bring leading-edge solutions to clients and vendor-partners.
Direct Network
Direct Network, Inc. is a full service direct response marketing and advertising agency specializing in mailing list management, mailing list brokerage, e-mail database management ...
Network Direct Inc.
Career Opportunities . Motivated Individuals! Network Direct, Inc. (NDI) is a 35 year old privately owned national marketing firm and we ...
Direct EDI, Inc. Expands Network Reach with Partner Program - Direct ...
Direct EDI is the leading EDI Provider in Supply Chain Solutions. We offer easiest web based EDI solutions to small to mid-size companies
Network Direct -- Consulting, inc5000 Article - Inc. Article
Provides contact center operations consulting and outsourced project management services to large and small clients.
Network Direct - Company Overview - Hoover's
Network Direct, Inc. Van Nuys, CA, United States. Print; E-Mail ... competition across multiple industries. Editor-Selected Competitor List For Network Direct