Twitter
Encyclopedia
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging
service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 character
s, informally known as "tweets".
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 300 million users as of 2011, generating over 300 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries
per day. It is sometimes described as "the SMS
of the Internet
."
Twitter Inc., the company that operates the service and associated website, is based in San Francisco, with additional servers and offices in San Antonio, Boston
, and New York City
.
ing company Odeo
. Dorsey 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 code
s. 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".
The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 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 shareholders. Williams fired Glass who was silent about his part in Twitter's startup until 2011. Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007.
(SXSW) festival. During the event, Twitter usage
increased 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."
Reaction at the festival was highly positive. Blogger Scott Beale said that Twitter "absolutely rul[ed]" SXSW. Social software researcher Danah Boyd
said Twitter "own[ed]" the festival. Twitter staff received the festival's Web Award prize with the remark "we'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"
The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station
by NASA
astronaut
T. J. Creamer
on January 22, 2010. By late November 2010, an average of a dozen updates per day were posted on the astronauts' communal account, @NASA_Astronauts. NASA has also hosted over 25 "tweetups"
, events that provide guests with VIP access to NASA facilities and speakers with the goal of leveraging participants' social networks to further the outreach goals of NASA.
In August 2010, the company appointed Adam Bain as President of Revenue from News Corp.'s Fox Audience Network.
On September 14, 2010, Twitter launched a redesigned site including a new logo, however it can still be seen when Twitter has an over capacity error.
, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of capital funding by the venture capital
ists who backed the company.
On October 16, 2008, Williams took over the role of CEO, and Dorsey became chairman of the board.
On October 4, 2010, Williams announced that he was stepping down as CEO. Dick Costolo
, formerly Twitter's chief operating officer
, became CEO. According to a Twitter blog
, dated October 4, 2010, Williams was to stay with the company and "be completely focused on product strategy."
According to The New York Times
, "Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Costolo forged a close relationship" when Williams was away. According to PC Magazine
, Williams was "no longer involved in the day-to-day goings on at the company". He is focused on developing a new startup, but he became a member of Twitter's board of directors, and promised to "help in any way I can". Stone is still with Twitter but is working with AOL as an "advisor on volunteer efforts and philanthropy".
Dorsey rejoined Twitter in March 2011, as executive chairman focusing on product development. His time is split with Square
where he is CEO, and whose offices are within walking distance of Twitter's in San Francisco.
In September 2011, Board Members and investors Fred Wilson
and Binjan Sabet resigned from Twitter's Board of Directors.
, Twitter moved up to the third-highest-ranking social networking site in January 2009 from its previous rank of twenty-second.
Twitter's usage spikes during prominent events. For example, a record was set during the 2010 FIFA World Cup
when fans wrote 2,940 tweets per second in the thirty-second period after Japan scored against Cameroon
on June 14, 2010. The record was broken again when 3,085 tweets per second were posted after the Los Angeles Lakers
' victory in the 2010 NBA Finals
on June 17, 2010, and then again at the close of Japan's victory over Denmark in the World Cup when users published 3,283 tweets per second. The current record was set during the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup Final
between Japan and the United States, when 7,196 tweets per second were published. When American singer Michael Jackson
died on June 25, 2009, Twitter servers crashed after users were updating their status to include the words "Michael Jackson" at a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour.
Twitter acquired application developer Atebits on April 11, 2010. Atebits had developed the Apple Design Award-winning Twitter client Tweetie
for the Mac
and iPhone
. The application, now called "Twitter" and distributed free of charge, is the official Twitter client for the iPhone, iPad
and Mac.
From September through October 2010, the company began rolling out "New Twitter", an entirely revamped edition of twitter.com. Changes included the ability to see pictures and videos without leaving Twitter itself by clicking on individual tweets which contain links to images and clips from a variety of supported websites including YouTube
, Flickr
, as well as a complete overhaul of the interface, which shifted links such as '@mentions' and 'Retweets' above the Twitter stream, while 'Messages and 'Log Out' became accessible via a black bar at the very top of twitter.com. As of November 1, 2010, the company confirmed that the "New Twitter experience" had been rolled out to all users.
On April 5, 2011, Twitter tested a new homepage, as well as phased out the "Old Twitter." However, a glitch came about after the page was launched, so the previous "retro" homepage was still in use until the issues were resolved. On April 20, 2011, the new homepage was reintroduced, though the "Switch to Old Twitter" option is still available to users.
(IRC) client.
Tweets are publicly visible by default; however, senders can restrict message delivery to just their followers. Users can tweet via the Twitter website, compatible external applications (such as for smartphone
s), or by Short Message Service
(SMS) available in certain countries. While the service is free, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider
fees.
Users may subscribe to other users' tweets – this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers or tweeps (Twitter + peeps). The users can also check the people who are un-subscribing them on Twitter better known as unfollowing via various services.
Twitter allows users the ability to update their profile by using their mobile phone either by text messaging or by apps released for certain smartphones / tablets.
In a 2009 Time
essay
, technology author Steven Johnson
described the basic mechanics of Twitter as "remarkably simple":
In June 2008, Twitter launched a verification program, allowing celebrities to get their accounts verified. Originally intended to help users verify which celebrity accounts were created by the celebrities themselves (and therefore are not fake), they have since been used to verify accounts of businesses and accounts for public figures who may not actually tweet but still wish to maintain control over the account that bears their name - for example, the Dalai Lama
. Verified accounts can be identified by a white check in a blue background, known as a verification badge, next to the user's full name, on the profile itself or next to the name in search results.
To repost a message from another Twitter user, and share it with one's own followers, the retweet function is symbolized by "RT" in the message.
In late 2009, the "Twitter Lists" feature was added, making it possible for users to follow (as well as mention and reply to) ad-hoc lists of authors instead of individual authors.
Through SMS, users can communicate with Twitter through five gateway
numbers: short code
s 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
, O2 and Orange
networks. In India, since Twitter only supports tweets from Bharti Airtel
, an alternative platform called smsTweet was set up by a user to work on all networks. A similar platform called GladlyCast exists for mobile phone users in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.
The messages were initially set to 140-character limit for compatibility with SMS messaging, introducing the shorthand notation and slang commonly used in SMS
messages. The 140-character limit has also increased the usage of URL shortening
services such as bit.ly
, goo.gl, and tr.im, and content-hosting services, such as Twitpic
, memozu.com and NotePub
to accommodate multimedia
content and text longer than 140 characters. Twitter uses its own t.co domain for automatic shortening of all URLs posted on its website.
Social networking researcher Danah Boyd
responded to the Pear Analytics survey by arguing that what the Pear researchers labelled "pointless babble" is better characterized as "social grooming
" and/or "peripheral awareness" (which she explains as persons "want[ing] to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn’t viable").
web traffic
analysis. Daily user estimates vary as the company does not publish statistics on 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 website in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had annual growth of 1,382 percent, increasing from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. It was followed by Zimbio
with a 240 percent increase, and Facebook
with a 228 percent increase. Twitter has a user retention rate of forty percent.
, Salesforce.com
, HootSuite
, and Twitterfeed. Less than half of tweets are posted using the web user interface with most users using third-party applications (based on analysis of 500 million tweets by Sysomos).
, an authentication method that does not require users to enter their password into the authenticating application. Previously, the OAuth authentication method was optional, it is now compulsory and the user-name/password authentication method has been made redundant and is no longer functional. Twitter stated that the move to OAuth will mean "increased security and a better experience."
Twitter is mainly used by older adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. "Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years," he said. According to comScore
only eleven percent of Twitter's users are aged twelve to seventeen. comScore attributes this to Twitter's "early adopter period" when the social network first gained popularity in business settings and news outlets attracting primarily older users. However, comScore as of late, has stated that Twitter has begun to "filter more into the mainstream", and "along with it came a culture of celebrity as Shaq
, Britney Spears
and Ashton Kutcher
joined the ranks of the Twitterati."
According to a study by Sysomos
in June 2009, women make up a slightly larger Twitter demographic than men — fifty-three percent over forty-seven percent. It also stated that five percent of users accounted for seventy-five percent of all activity, and that New York has the most Twitter users.
According to Quancast, twenty-seven million people in the US used Twitter as of September 3, 2009. Sixty-three percent of Twitter users are less than thirty-five years old; sixty percent of Twitter users are Caucasian, but a higher than average (compared to other Internet properties) are African American (sixteen percent) and Hispanic (eleven percent); fifty-eight percent of Twitter users have a total household income of at least $60,000.
On September 7, 2011, Twitter announced that it has 100 million active users logging in at least once a month and 50 million active users every day.
ist growth funding, although exact numbers are not publicly disclosed. Twitter's first A round of funding was for an undisclosed amount that is rumored to have been between $1 million and $5 million. Its second B round of funding in 2008 was for $22 million and its third 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.
In May 2008, The Industry Standard
remarked that Twitter's long-term viability is limited by a lack of revenue. Twitter board member Todd Chaffee forecast that the company could profit from e-commerce, noting that users may want to buy items directly from Twitter since it already provides product recommendations and promotions.
The company raised $200 million in new venture capital in December 2010, at a valuation of approximately $3.7 billion. In March 2011, 35,000 Twitter shares sold for $34.50 each on Sharespost, an implied valuation of $7.8 billion. In August, 2010 Twitter announced a "significant" investment lead by Digital Sky Technology that, at $800 million, was reported to be the largest venture round
in history.
Twitter has been identified as a possible candidate for an initial public offering
by 2013.
after being illegally obtained by Hacker Croll
. The documents projected 2009 revenues of $400,000 in the third quarter and $4 million in the fourth quarter along with 25 million users by 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 planned to achieve those numbers was published. In response, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone published a blog post suggesting the possibility of legal action against the hacker.
On April 13, 2010, Twitter announced plans to offer paid advertising
for companies that would be able to purchase "promoted tweets" to appear in selective search results on the Twitter website, similar to Google Adwords'
advertising model. As of April 13, Twitter announced it had already signed up a number of companies wishing to advertise including Sony Pictures, Red Bull
, Best Buy
, and Starbucks
.
The company generated $45 million in annual revenue in 2010, after beginning sales midway through that year. The company operated at a loss through most of 2010. Revenues were forecast for $100 million to $110 million in 2011. Users' photos can generate royalty-free revenue for Twitter, with an agreement with WENN
being announced in May 2011. In June 2011, Twitter announced it would offer small businesses a self serve advertising system.
framework, deployed on a performance enhanced Ruby Enterprise Edition implementation of Ruby
.
From the spring of 2007 until 2008 the messages were handled by a Ruby persistent
queue server called Starling
, but since 2009 implementation has been gradually replaced with software written in Scala. The service's application programming interface
(API) allows other web service
s and applications to integrate with Twitter.
s" — the most common phrases appearing in messages. Biz Stone
explains that all messages are instantly indexed
and that "with this newly launched feature, Twitter has become something unexpectedly important — a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now."
When Twitter experiences an outage, users see the "fail whale" error message
image created by Yiying Lu, illustrating eight orange birds using a net to hoist a whale from the ocean captioned "Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again."
Twitter had approximately ninety-eight percent uptime
in 2007 (or about six full days of downtime). The downtime was particularly noticeable during events popular with the technology industry such as the 2008 Macworld Conference & Expo
keynote address
.
about its users and shares it with third parties. The service reserves the right to sell this information as an asset if the company changes hands. While Twitter displays no advertising, advertisers can target
users based on their history of tweets and may quote tweets in ads directed specifically to the user.
A security vulnerability was reported on April 7, 2007, by Nitesh Dhanjani and Rujith. Since Twitter used the phone number
of the sender of an SMS
message as authentication, malicious users could update someone else's status page by using SMS spoofing
. The vulnerability could be used if the spoofer knew the phone number registered to their victim's account. Within a few weeks of this discovery Twitter introduced an optional personal identification number
(PIN) that its users could use to authenticate their SMS-originating messages.
On January 5, 2009, 33 high-profile Twitter accounts were compromised after a Twitter administrator's password was guessed by a dictionary attack
. Falsified tweets — including sexually explicit and drug-related messages — were sent from these accounts.
Twitter launched the beta version of their "Verified Accounts" service on June 11, 2009, allowing famous or notable people to announce their Twitter account name. The home pages of these accounts display a badge indicating their status.
In May 2010, a bug was discovered by İnci Sözlük users that allowed Twitter users to force others to follow them without the other users' consent or knowledge. For example, comedian Conan O'Brien
's account, which had been set to follow only one person, was changed to receive nearly 200 malicious subscriptions.
In response to Twitter's security breaches, the Federal Trade Commission
brought charges against the service which were settled on June 24, 2010. This was the first time the FTC had taken action against a social network for security lapses. The settlement requires Twitter to take a number of steps to secure users' private information, including maintenance of a "comprehensive information security program" to be independently audited biannually.
On December 14, 2010, the United States Department of Justice
issued a subpoena directing Twitter
to provide information for accounts registered to or associated with WikiLeaks
. Twitter decided to notify its users and said in a statement, "...it's our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so".
A "MouseOver" exploit occurred on September 21, 2010, when an XSS Worm
became active on Twitter. When an account user
held the mouse cursor over
blacked out parts of a tweet, the worm within the script would automatically open links and re-post itself on the reader's account. The exploit was then re-used to post pop-up ads and links to pornographic sites. The origin is unclear but Pearce H. Delphin (known on Twitter as @zzap) and a Scandinavian developer, Magnus Holm, both claim to have modified the exploit of a user, possibly Masato Kinugawa, who was using it to create coloured Tweets. Kinugawa, a Japanese developer, reported the XSS vulnerability to Twitter on August 14. Later, when he found it was exploitable again, he created the account 'RainbowTwtr' and used it to post coloured messages. Delphin says he exposed the security flaw by tweeting a JavaScript function for "onMouseOver", and Holm later created and posted the XSS Worm
that automatically re-tweeted itself. Security firm Sophos reported the virus was spread by people doing it for "fun and games", but noted it could be exploited by cybercriminals. Twitter issued a statement on their status blog at 13:50 UTC that "The exploit is fully patched". Twitter representative Carolyn Penner said no charges would be pressed.
In May 2011, a claimant known as "CTB" (subsequently identified as Ryan Giggs
) in the case of CTB v Twitter Inc., Persons Unknown
took legal action at the High Court of Justice
in London against Twitter., requesting that Twitter release details of account holders. This followed gossip
posted on Twitter about Giggs' private life, causing conflict relating to privacy injunctions
.
On May 29, 2011, it was reported that South Tyneside
council in England had successfully taken legal action against Twitter in a court in California, which forced Twitter to reveal the details of five user accounts. The council was trying to discover the identity of a blog
ger called "Mr Monkey" who allegedly posted libellous statements about three local councillors.
projects developed while overcoming technical challenges of their service. Notable projects are the Gizzard Scala framework
for creating distributed datastores and the distributed graph database FlockDB
.
service created by Twitter. It is only available for links posted to Twitter and not available for general use. Eventually all links posted to Twitter will use a t.co wrapper. Twitter hopes that the service will be able to protect users from malicious sites, and will use it to track clicks on links within tweets.
Having previously used the services of third parties TinyURL
and bit.ly
, Twitter began experimenting with its own URL shortening service for direct messages in March 2010 using the twt.tl domain, before it purchased the t.co domain. The service was tested on the main site using the accounts @TwitterAPI, @rsarver and @raffi. On September 2, 2010, an email from Twitter to users said they would be expanding the roll-out of the service to users. On June 7, 2011, Twitter announced that it was rolling out the feature.
, 2010–2011 Tunisian protests, 2009–2010 Iranian election protests, and 2009 Moldova civil unrest
. The governments of Iran and Egypt blocked the service in retaliation. The service is also used as a form of civil disobedience
: in 2010, users expressed outrage over the Twitter Joke Trial by making obvious jokes about terrorism; and in the British privacy injunction debate
in the same country a year later, where several celebrities that had taken out anonymised injunctions, most notably the Manchester United player Ryan Giggs
, were identified by thousands of users in protest to traditional journalism being censored.
Twitter is also increasingly used for making TV more interactive and social. This effect is sometimes referred to as the "virtual watercooler" or social television
. Twitter has been used successfully to encourage people to watch live TV events, such as the Oscars, the Super Bowl
and the MTV Video Music Awards; this strategy has however proven less effective with regularly scheduled TV shows. Such direct cross-promotions have been banned from French television due to regulations against secret advertising.
In May 2008, The Wall Street Journal
wrote that social networking services such as Twitter "elicit mixed feelings in the technology-savvy people who have been their early adopters
. Fans say they are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel 'too' connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they're having for dinner."
Tech writer Bruce Sterling
opined in 2007 that using Twitter for "literate communication" is "about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite the Iliad
". In September 2008, the journalist Clive Thompson
mused in a The New York Times Magazine
editorial that the service had expanded narcissism into "a new, supermetabolic extreme—the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world." Conversely, Vancouver Sun columnist Steve Dotto
opined that part of Twitter's appeal is the challenge of trying to publish such messages in tight constraints, and Jonathan Zittrain
, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School
, said that "the qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful".
In 2009, Nielsen Online
reported that Twitter has a user retention rate of forty percent. Many people stop using the service after a month, therefore the site may potentially reach only about ten percent of all Internet users
. In 2009, Twitter won the "Breakout of the Year" Webby Award. During a February 2009 discussion on National Public Radio
's Weekend Edition
, the journalist Daniel Schorr
stated that Twitter accounts of events lacked rigorous fact-checking and other editorial improvements. In response, Andy Carvin
gave Schorr two examples of breaking news
stories that played out on Twitter and said users wanted first-hand accounts and sometimes debunked stories. Time
magazine acknowledged growing level of influence in its 2010 Time 100
; to determine the influence of people, it used a formula based on famous social networking sites, Twitter and Facebook. The list ranges from Barack Obama
and Oprah Winfrey
to Lady Gaga
and Ashton Kutcher
.
After claims in the media that the hashtags #wikileaks
and #occupywallstreet
were being censored because they did not show up on the site's list of trending topics, Twitter responded by stating that it does not censor hashtags unless they contain obscenities.
of TechCrunch
commented that although he liked the service, he also noted that he felt uncomfortable with the fact that every user's Twitter page is available to the public.
put it on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "Limiting yourself to 140 characters—the maximum for messages on this diabolically addictive social-networking tool—is easy."
On November 22, 2010, Biz Stone
, a cofounder of the company, expressed for the first time the idea of a Twitter news network, a concept of wire-like news service he has been working on for years.
Microblogging
Microblogging is a broadcast medium in the form of blogging. A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically smaller in both actual and aggregate file size...
service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 character
Character (computing)
In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written form of a natural language....
s, informally known as "tweets".
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 300 million users as of 2011, generating over 300 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries
Web search query
A web search query is a query that a user enters into web search engine to satisfy his or her information needs. Web search queries are distinctive in that they are unstructured and often ambiguous; they vary greatly from standard query languages which are governed by strict syntax rules.- Types...
per day. It is sometimes described as "the SMS
SMS
SMS is a form of text messaging communication on phones and mobile phones. The terms SMS or sms may also refer to:- Computer hardware :...
of the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
."
Twitter Inc., the company that operates the service and associated website, is based in San Francisco, with additional servers and offices in San Antonio, Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
, and New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
.
History
Creation
Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcastPodcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
ing company Odeo
Odeo
Odeo was a directory and search destination website for RSS syndicated audio & video. It employed tools that enabled users to create, record, and share podcasts with a simple Adobe Flash-based interface....
. Dorsey 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
Noah Glass
After leaving Industrial Light and Magic, Glass worked on several projects with Marc Canter, founder of Macromind which later became Macromedia birthplace of Shockwave which later became Flash animation software....
, inspired by Flickr
Flickr
Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...
and the five-character length of American SMS short code
Short code
Short codes are special telephone numbers, significantly shorter than full telephone numbers, that can be used to address SMS and MMS messages from certain service provider's mobile phones or fixed phones...
s. 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".
"...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 Dorsey
The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone
Biz Stone
Christopher Isaac "Biz" Stone is a co-founder and Creative Director of Twitter, Inc and also helped to create and launch Xanga, Blogger, Odeo, and , founded in June 2011 with his long time collaborators Evan Williams and Jason Goldman to focus on building systems that help people work together to...
, 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 shareholders. Williams fired Glass who was silent about his part in Twitter's startup until 2011. Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007.
Reaction
The tipping point for Twitter's popularity was the 2007 South by SouthwestSouth by Southwest
South by Southwest is an Austin, Texas based company dedicated to planning conferences, trade shows, festivals and other events. Their current roster of annual events include: SXSW Music, SXSW Film, SXSW Interactive, SXSWedu, and SXSWeco and take place every spring in Austin, Texas, United States...
(SXSW) festival. During the event, Twitter usage
Twitter usage
Ever since the inception of Twitter on July 15, 2006, there has been many notable uses for the service, in a variety of environments.-In Policing:...
increased 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
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
s Steven Levy
Steven Levy
Steven Levy is an American journalist who has written several books on computers, technology, cryptography, the Internet, cybersecurity, and privacy.-Career:...
. "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."
Reaction at the festival was highly positive. Blogger Scott Beale said that Twitter "absolutely rul[ed]" SXSW. Social software researcher Danah Boyd
Danah Boyd
danah boyd also known as Danah Michele Boyd, is an American social media researcher known for her public commentary on the use of social networking sites by youth...
said Twitter "own[ed]" the festival. Twitter staff received the festival's Web Award prize with the remark "we'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"
International Space Station
The International Space Station is a habitable, artificial satellite in low Earth orbit. The ISS follows the Salyut, Almaz, Cosmos, Skylab, and Mir space stations, as the 11th space station launched, not including the Genesis I and II prototypes...
by NASA
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
astronaut
Astronaut
An astronaut or cosmonaut is a person trained by a human spaceflight program to command, pilot, or serve as a crew member of a spacecraft....
T. J. Creamer
Timothy Creamer
Timothy "TJ" Creamer is a NASA astronaut and a Colonel in the United States Army. Creamer was born in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, but considers Upper Marlboro, Maryland, to be his hometown. He is married to the former Margaret E. Hammer. They have two children.- Education :Bishop McNamara High School,...
on January 22, 2010. By late November 2010, an average of a dozen updates per day were posted on the astronauts' communal account, @NASA_Astronauts. NASA has also hosted over 25 "tweetups"
NASA Tweetup
NASA has hosted many events for its Twitter enthusiasts called NASA Tweetups. These events provide guests with VIP access to NASA facilities and speakers with the goal of leveraging participants' social networks to further the outreach requirements of NASA as laid out in the National Aeronautics...
, events that provide guests with VIP access to NASA facilities and speakers with the goal of leveraging participants' social networks to further the outreach goals of NASA.
In August 2010, the company appointed Adam Bain as President of Revenue from News Corp.'s Fox Audience Network.
On September 14, 2010, Twitter launched a redesigned site including a new logo, however it can still be seen when Twitter has an over capacity error.
Leadership
As chief executive officerChief executive officer
A chief executive officer , managing director , Executive Director for non-profit organizations, or chief executive is the highest-ranking corporate officer or administrator in charge of total management of an organization...
, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of capital funding by the venture capital
Venture capital
Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...
ists who backed the company.
On October 16, 2008, Williams took over the role of CEO, and Dorsey became chairman of the board.
On October 4, 2010, Williams announced that he was stepping down as CEO. Dick Costolo
Dick Costolo
Dick Costolo is the current CEO of Twitter and was its former COO. He took over as CEO from Evan Williams in October 2010.He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Michigan. Costolo became involved in theater during his sophomore year at University of...
, formerly Twitter's chief operating officer
Chief operating officer
A Chief Operating Officer or Director of Operations can be one of the highest-ranking executives in an organization and comprises part of the "C-Suite"...
, became CEO. According to a Twitter blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
, dated October 4, 2010, Williams was to stay with the company and "be completely focused on product strategy."
According to The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, "Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Costolo forged a close relationship" when Williams was away. According to PC Magazine
PC Magazine
PC Magazine is a computer magazine published by Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009...
, Williams was "no longer involved in the day-to-day goings on at the company". He is focused on developing a new startup, but he became a member of Twitter's board of directors, and promised to "help in any way I can". Stone is still with Twitter but is working with AOL as an "advisor on volunteer efforts and philanthropy".
Dorsey rejoined Twitter in March 2011, as executive chairman focusing on product development. His time is split with Square
Square (payment service)
Square is an electronic payment service, and the name of the card-reading device it uses. Square allows users in the United States to accept credit cards through their mobile phones, either by swiping the card on the Square device or by manually entering the details on the phone.-Creation:The...
where he is CEO, and whose offices are within walking distance of Twitter's in San Francisco.
In September 2011, Board Members and investors Fred Wilson
Fred Wilson
Fred Wilson is a former politician in Ontario, Canada. He served as a New Democratic Party member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1990 to 1995, and was a cabinet minister in the government of Bob Rae....
and Binjan Sabet resigned from Twitter's Board of Directors.
Growth
The company experienced rapid growth. It had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007. This grew to 100 million tweets posted per quarter in 2008. In February 2010, Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day. By March 2010, the company recorded over 70,000 registered applications. As of June 2010, about 65 million tweets were posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each second, according to Twitter. As noted on Compete.comCompete.com
Compete.com is a web traffic analysis service of Compete, Inc. which operates in the United States and publishes the approximate number of global visitors to the top 1,000,000 web sites in the world...
, Twitter moved up to the third-highest-ranking social networking site in January 2009 from its previous rank of twenty-second.
Twitter's usage spikes during prominent events. For example, a record was set during the 2010 FIFA World Cup
2010 FIFA World Cup
The 2010 FIFA World Cup was the 19th FIFA World Cup, the world championship for men's national association football teams. It took place in South Africa from 11 June to 11 July 2010...
when fans wrote 2,940 tweets per second in the thirty-second period after Japan scored against Cameroon
Cameroon
Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon , is a country in west Central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west; Chad to the northeast; the Central African Republic to the east; and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo to the south. Cameroon's coastline lies on the...
on June 14, 2010. The record was broken again when 3,085 tweets per second were posted after the Los Angeles Lakers
Los Angeles Lakers
The Los Angeles Lakers are an American professional basketball team based in Los Angeles, California. They play in the Pacific Division of the Western Conference in the National Basketball Association...
' victory in the 2010 NBA Finals
2010 NBA Finals
The 2010 NBA Finals was the National Basketball Association championship series for the 2009–10 season. The best-of-seven playoff was contested between the Los Angeles Lakers, champions of the Western Conference and defending NBA champions, and the Boston Celtics, champions of the Eastern Conference...
on June 17, 2010, and then again at the close of Japan's victory over Denmark in the World Cup when users published 3,283 tweets per second. The current record was set during the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup Final
2011 FIFA Women's World Cup Final
The final of the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup was played between and the . The match took place in Commerzbank-Arena, in Frankfurt, Germany, on 17 July 2011...
between Japan and the United States, when 7,196 tweets per second were published. When American singer Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson
Michael Joseph Jackson was an American recording artist, entertainer, and businessman. Referred to as the King of Pop, or by his initials MJ, Jackson is recognized as the most successful entertainer of all time by Guinness World Records...
died on June 25, 2009, Twitter servers crashed after users were updating their status to include the words "Michael Jackson" at a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour.
Twitter acquired application developer Atebits on April 11, 2010. Atebits had developed the Apple Design Award-winning Twitter client Tweetie
Tweetie
Twitter is a client for Twitter, the social networking website. There is a mobile version that runs on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, and a desktop version runs on Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard ....
for the Mac
Macintosh
The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...
and iPhone
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
. The application, now called "Twitter" and distributed free of charge, is the official Twitter client for the iPhone, iPad
IPad
The iPad is a line of tablet computers designed, developed and marketed by Apple Inc., primarily as a platform for audio-visual media including books, periodicals, movies, music, games, and web content. The iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010 by Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs. Its size and...
and Mac.
From September through October 2010, the company began rolling out "New Twitter", an entirely revamped edition of twitter.com. Changes included the ability to see pictures and videos without leaving Twitter itself by clicking on individual tweets which contain links to images and clips from a variety of supported websites including YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
, Flickr
Flickr
Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...
, as well as a complete overhaul of the interface, which shifted links such as '@mentions' and 'Retweets' above the Twitter stream, while 'Messages and 'Log Out' became accessible via a black bar at the very top of twitter.com. As of November 1, 2010, the company confirmed that the "New Twitter experience" had been rolled out to all users.
On April 5, 2011, Twitter tested a new homepage, as well as phased out the "Old Twitter." However, a glitch came about after the page was launched, so the previous "retro" homepage was still in use until the issues were resolved. On April 20, 2011, the new homepage was reintroduced, though the "Switch to Old Twitter" option is still available to users.
Features
Twitter has been compared to a web-based Internet Relay ChatInternet Relay Chat
Internet Relay Chat is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file...
(IRC) client.
Tweets are publicly visible by default; however, senders can restrict message delivery to just their followers. Users can tweet via the Twitter website, compatible external applications (such as for smartphone
Smartphone
A smartphone is a high-end mobile phone built on a mobile computing platform, with more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary feature phone. The first smartphones were devices that mainly combined the functions of a personal digital assistant and a mobile phone or camera...
s), or by Short Message Service
SMS
SMS is a form of text messaging communication on phones and mobile phones. The terms SMS or sms may also refer to:- Computer hardware :...
(SMS) available in certain countries. While the service is free, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider
Telecommunications Service Provider
A telecommunications service provider or TSP is a type of communications service provider that has traditionally provided telephone and similar services...
fees.
Users may subscribe to other users' tweets – this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers or tweeps (Twitter + peeps). The users can also check the people who are un-subscribing them on Twitter better known as unfollowing via various services.
Twitter allows users the ability to update their profile by using their mobile phone either by text messaging or by apps released for certain smartphones / tablets.
In a 2009 Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
essay
Essay
An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...
, technology author Steven Johnson
Steven Berlin Johnson
Steven Berlin Johnson is an American popular science author.-Education:Steven Johnson attended the prestigious St. Albans School as a youth. He completed his undergraduate degree at Brown University, where he studied semiotics, a part of Brown's modern culture and media department...
described the basic mechanics of Twitter as "remarkably simple":
In June 2008, Twitter launched a verification program, allowing celebrities to get their accounts verified. Originally intended to help users verify which celebrity accounts were created by the celebrities themselves (and therefore are not fake), they have since been used to verify accounts of businesses and accounts for public figures who may not actually tweet but still wish to maintain control over the account that bears their name - for example, the Dalai Lama
Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama is a high lama in the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" branch of Tibetan Buddhism. The name is a combination of the Mongolian word далай meaning "Ocean" and the Tibetan word bla-ma meaning "teacher"...
. Verified accounts can be identified by a white check in a blue background, known as a verification badge, next to the user's full name, on the profile itself or next to the name in search results.
Messages
Users can group posts together by topic or type by use of hashtags – words or phrases prefixed with a"#" sign. Similarly, the "@" sign followed by a username is used for mentioning or replying to other users.To repost a message from another Twitter user, and share it with one's own followers, the retweet function is symbolized by "RT" in the message.
In late 2009, the "Twitter Lists" feature was added, making it possible for users to follow (as well as mention and reply to) ad-hoc lists of authors instead of individual authors.
Through SMS, users can communicate with Twitter through five gateway
Gateway (telecommunications)
In telecommunications, the term gateway has the following meaning:*In a communications network, a network node equipped for interfacing with another network that uses different protocols....
numbers: short code
Short code
Short codes are special telephone numbers, significantly shorter than full telephone numbers, that can be used to address SMS and MMS messages from certain service provider's mobile phones or fixed phones...
s for the United States, Canada, India, New Zealand, and an Isle of Man
Isle of Man
The Isle of Man , otherwise known simply as Mann , is a self-governing British Crown Dependency, located in the Irish Sea between the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, within the British Isles. The head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, who holds the title of Lord of Mann. The Lord of Mann is...
-based number for international use. There is also a short code in the United Kingdom which is only accessible to those on the Vodafone
Vodafone
Vodafone Group Plc is a global telecommunications company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the world's largest mobile telecommunications company measured by revenues and the world's second-largest measured by subscribers , with around 341 million proportionate subscribers as of...
, O2 and Orange
Orange UK
Orange is a mobile network operator and internet service provider in the United Kingdom, which launched in 1994. It was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but was purchased by France Télécom in 2000, which then adopted the Orange brand for all its other mobile communications activities...
networks. In India, since Twitter only supports tweets from Bharti Airtel
Bharti Airtel
Bharti Airtel Limited , commonly known as Airtel, is an Indian telecommunications company that operates in 20 countries across South Asia, Africa and the Channel Islands. It operates a GSM network in all countries, providing 2G or 3G services depending upon the country of operation...
, an alternative platform called smsTweet was set up by a user to work on all networks. A similar platform called GladlyCast exists for mobile phone users in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.
The messages were initially set to 140-character limit for compatibility with SMS messaging, introducing the shorthand notation and slang commonly used in SMS
Internet slang
Internet slang is a type of slang that Internet users have popularized, and in many cases, have coined. Such terms often originate with the purpose of saving keystrokes. Many people use the same abbreviations in texting and instant messaging, and social networking websites...
messages. The 140-character limit has also increased the usage of URL shortening
URL shortening
URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a Uniform Resource Locator may be made substantially shorter in length and still direct to the required page. This is achieved by using an HTTP Redirect on a domain name that is short, which links to the web page that has a long URL...
services such as bit.ly
Bit.ly
bitly is a URL shortening service owned by bitly, Inc., a betaworks company. It is especially popular on microblogging website Twitter because it is the default URL shortening service on the website since May 6, 2009, replacing TinyURL...
, goo.gl, and tr.im, and content-hosting services, such as Twitpic
Twitpic
TwitPic is a website that allows users to easily post pictures to the Twitter microblogging and social media service. TwitPic is often used by citizen journalists to upload and distribute pictures in near real-time as an event is taking place.-History:...
, memozu.com and NotePub
NotePub
NotePub is an online notepad that allows for private, public, and shared notes. NotePub is also an open purpose wiki without a markup language. Notes can include files and images, and can be linked to other notes within NotePub, or to external websites. Content is organized chronologically and with...
to accommodate multimedia
Multimedia
Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only, or...
content and text longer than 140 characters. Twitter uses its own t.co domain for automatic shortening of all URLs posted on its website.
Tweet contents
San Antonio-based market-research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the US and in English) over a two-week period in August 2009 from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM (CST) and separated them into six categories:- Pointless babbleSmall talk (phatic communication)Small talk is an informal type of discourse that does not cover any functional topics of conversation or any transactions that need to be addressed....
– 40% - Conversational – 38%
- Pass-along value – 9%
- Self-promotion – 6%
- SpamSpam (electronic)Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately...
– 4% - News – 4%
Social networking researcher Danah Boyd
Danah Boyd
danah boyd also known as Danah Michele Boyd, is an American social media researcher known for her public commentary on the use of social networking sites by youth...
responded to the Pear Analytics survey by arguing that what the Pear researchers labelled "pointless babble" is better characterized as "social grooming
Social grooming
In social animals, including humans, social grooming or allogrooming is an activity in which individuals in a group clean or maintain one another's body or appearance. It is a major social activity, and a means by which animals who live in proximity can bond and reinforce social structures, family...
" and/or "peripheral awareness" (which she explains as persons "want[ing] to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn’t viable").
Rankings
Twitter is ranked as one of the ten-most-visited websites worldwide by Alexa'sAlexa Internet
Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is known for its toolbar and Web site. Once installed, the toolbar collects data on browsing behavior which is transmitted to the Web site where it is stored and analyzed and is the basis for the company's Web traffic...
web traffic
Web traffic
Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. It is a large portion of Internet traffic. This is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit...
analysis. Daily user estimates vary as the company does not publish statistics on active accounts. A February 2009 Compete.com
Compete.com
Compete.com is a web traffic analysis service of Compete, Inc. which operates in the United States and publishes the approximate number of global visitors to the top 1,000,000 web sites in the world...
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 website in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had annual growth of 1,382 percent, increasing from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. It was followed by Zimbio
Zimbio
Zimbio.com, a San Carlos, California, USA-based company is an online magazine publisher. It was founded by Tony Mamone and Danny Khatib. The management team consists of Tony Mamone as CEO, Danny Khatib as President, John Newlin as Editor-in-Chief, and Bruce Martin as Chief Technology Officer.Zimbio...
with a 240 percent increase, and Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
with a 228 percent increase. Twitter has a user retention rate of forty percent.
Adding and following content
There are numerous tools for adding content, monitoring content and conversations including Twitvid (video sharing), TweetdeckTweetDeck
TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR desktop application for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Foursquare, and MySpace. Like other Twitter applications it interfaces with the Twitter API to allow users to send and receive tweets and view profiles...
, Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is an enterprise cloud computing company headquartered in San Francisco that distributes business software on a subscription basis. Salesforce.com hosts the applications off-site...
, HootSuite
HootSuite
HootSuite is a social media communications dashboard often used for online brand management. It publishes to websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace, and WordPress. It also publishes to Flickr, Tumblr, and YouTube via HootSuite Apps...
, and Twitterfeed. Less than half of tweets are posted using the web user interface with most users using third-party applications (based on analysis of 500 million tweets by Sysomos).
Authentication
As of August 31, 2010, third-party Twitter applications are required to use OAuthOAuth
OAuth is an open standard for authorization. It allows users to share their private resources stored on one site with another site without having to hand out their credentials, typically username and password.OAuth allows users to hand out tokens instead of credentials to their data hosted by a...
, an authentication method that does not require users to enter their password into the authenticating application. Previously, the OAuth authentication method was optional, it is now compulsory and the user-name/password authentication method has been made redundant and is no longer functional. Twitter stated that the move to OAuth will mean "increased security and a better experience."
Demographics
Note: Visitor Age 15+ Home and Work Locations. Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.Twitter is mainly used by older adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. "Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years," he said. According to comScore
ComScore
comScore is a Internet marketing research company providing marketing data and services to many of the Internet's largest businesses. comScore tracks all internet data on its surveyed computers in order to study online behavior....
only eleven percent of Twitter's users are aged twelve to seventeen. comScore attributes this to Twitter's "early adopter period" when the social network first gained popularity in business settings and news outlets attracting primarily older users. However, comScore as of late, has stated that Twitter has begun to "filter more into the mainstream", and "along with it came a culture of celebrity as Shaq
Shaquille O'Neal
Shaquille Rashaun O'Neal , nicknamed "Shaq" , is a former American professional basketball player. Standing tall and weighing , he was one of the heaviest players ever to play in the NBA...
, Britney Spears
Britney Spears
Britney Jean Spears is an American recording artist and entertainer. Born in McComb, Mississippi, and raised in Kentwood, Louisiana, Spears began performing as a child, landing acting roles in stage productions and television shows. She signed with Jive Records in 1997 and released her debut album...
and Ashton Kutcher
Ashton Kutcher
Christopher Ashton Kutcher , best known as Ashton Kutcher, is an American actor, producer, former fashion model and comedian, best known for his portrayal of Michael Kelso in the Fox sitcom That '70s Show...
joined the ranks of the Twitterati."
According to a study by Sysomos
Sysomos
Sysomos Inc. is a Toronto-based social media analytics company.The company uses content of social media sites including blogs, forums and Twitter to create a real-time picture on how products, people, and brands are covered in those media sites. Unlike other similar services, it also attempts to...
in June 2009, women make up a slightly larger Twitter demographic than men — fifty-three percent over forty-seven percent. It also stated that five percent of users accounted for seventy-five percent of all activity, and that New York has the most Twitter users.
According to Quancast, twenty-seven million people in the US used Twitter as of September 3, 2009. Sixty-three percent of Twitter users are less than thirty-five years old; sixty percent of Twitter users are Caucasian, but a higher than average (compared to other Internet properties) are African American (sixteen percent) and Hispanic (eleven percent); fifty-eight percent of Twitter users have a total household income of at least $60,000.
On September 7, 2011, Twitter announced that it has 100 million active users logging in at least once a month and 50 million active users every day.
Funding
Twitter raised over US$57 million from venture capitalVenture capital
Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...
ist growth funding, although exact numbers are not publicly disclosed. Twitter's first A round of funding was for an undisclosed amount that is rumored to have been between $1 million and $5 million. Its second B round of funding in 2008 was for $22 million and its third C round of funding in 2009 was for $35 million from Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital
Benchmark Capital
Benchmark Capital is a venture capital firm responsible for the early stage funding of some very successful startups. In 1997, the firm invested $6.7 million in eBay, which became worth more than $5 billion by the spring of 1999. Other high-profile investments include Ariba, Juniper Networks, Red...
along with an undisclosed amount from other investors including Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and Insight Venture Partners
Insight Venture Partners
Insight Venture Partners is a New York-based private equity and venture capital firm founded in 1995 by Jeff Horing and Jerry Murdock. The firm focuses exclusively on software and Internet-enabled businesses and currently has a capital base of approximately $5 billion.The firm’s Executive Advisory...
. Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures
Union Square Ventures
Union Square Ventures is a venture capital firm based in New York City, New York, United States.The firm was founded by Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham in 2004...
, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions.
In May 2008, The Industry Standard
The Industry Standard
The Industry Standard is a news web site dedicated to technology business news, part of InfoWorld, a news web site covering technology in general...
remarked that Twitter's long-term viability is limited by a lack of revenue. Twitter board member Todd Chaffee forecast that the company could profit from e-commerce, noting that users may want to buy items directly from Twitter since it already provides product recommendations and promotions.
The company raised $200 million in new venture capital in December 2010, at a valuation of approximately $3.7 billion. In March 2011, 35,000 Twitter shares sold for $34.50 each on Sharespost, an implied valuation of $7.8 billion. In August, 2010 Twitter announced a "significant" investment lead by Digital Sky Technology that, at $800 million, was reported to be the largest venture round
Venture round
A venture round is a type of funding round used for venture capital financing, by which startup companies obtain investment, generally from venture capitalists and other institutional investors. The availability of venture funding is among the primary stimuli for the development of new companies...
in history.
Twitter has been identified as a possible candidate for an initial public offering
Initial public offering
An initial public offering or stock market launch, is the first sale of stock by a private company to the public. It can be used by either small or large companies to raise expansion capital and become publicly traded enterprises...
by 2013.
Revenue sources
In July 2009, some of Twitter's revenue and user growth documents were published on TechCrunchTechCrunch
TechCrunch is a web publication that offers technology news and analysis, as well as profiling of startup companies, products, and websites. It was founded by Michael Arrington in 2005, and was first published on June 11, 2005....
after being illegally obtained by Hacker Croll
Hacker Croll
Hacker Croll, is a French self-taught person who is notable for hacking Twitter in July 2009. He was in close contact with reporters from TechCrunch who published numerous articles about the information obtained and the incident itself...
. The documents projected 2009 revenues of $400,000 in the third quarter and $4 million in the fourth quarter along with 25 million users by 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 planned to achieve those numbers was published. In response, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone published a blog post suggesting the possibility of legal action against the hacker.
On April 13, 2010, Twitter announced plans to offer paid advertising
Advertising
Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...
for companies that would be able to purchase "promoted tweets" to appear in selective search results on the Twitter website, similar to Google Adwords'
AdWords
Google AdWords is Google's main advertising product and main source of revenue. Google's total advertising revenues were USD$28 billion in 2010. AdWords offers pay-per-click advertising, cost-per-thousand advertising, and site-targeted advertising for text, banner, and rich-media ads. The AdWords...
advertising model. As of April 13, Twitter announced it had already signed up a number of companies wishing to advertise including Sony Pictures, Red Bull
Red Bull
Red Bull is an energy drink sold by the Austrian Red Bull GmbH, created in 1987 by the Austrian entrepreneur Dietrich Mateschitz. In terms of market share, Red Bull is the most popular energy drink in the world, with 3 billion cans sold each year. Dietrich Mateschitz was inspired by an already...
, Best Buy
Best Buy
Best Buy Co., Inc. is an American specialty retailer of consumer electronics in the United States, accounting for 19% of the market. It also operates in Mexico, Canada & China. The company's subsidiaries include Geek Squad, CinemaNow, Magnolia Audio Video, Pacific Sales, and, in Canada operates...
, and Starbucks
Starbucks
Starbucks Corporation is an international coffee and coffeehouse chain based in Seattle, Washington. Starbucks is the largest coffeehouse company in the world, with 17,009 stores in 55 countries, including over 11,000 in the United States, over 1,000 in Canada, over 700 in the United Kingdom, and...
.
The company generated $45 million in annual revenue in 2010, after beginning sales midway through that year. The company operated at a loss through most of 2010. Revenues were forecast for $100 million to $110 million in 2011. Users' photos can generate royalty-free revenue for Twitter, with an agreement with WENN
World Entertainment News Network
World Entertainment News Network is a 24/7 global entertainment text and photo wire services provider headquartered in London with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas and Berlin....
being announced in May 2011. In June 2011, Twitter announced it would offer small businesses a self serve advertising system.
Implementation
The Twitter Web interface uses the Ruby on RailsRuby on Rails
Ruby on Rails, often shortened to Rails or RoR, is an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language.-History:...
framework, deployed on a performance enhanced Ruby Enterprise Edition implementation of Ruby
Ruby (programming language)
Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was first developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto...
.
From the spring of 2007 until 2008 the messages were handled by a Ruby persistent
Persistent data structure
In computing, a persistent data structure is a data structure which always preserves the previous version of itself when it is modified; such data structures are effectively immutable, as their operations do not update the structure in-place, but instead always yield a new updated structure...
queue server called Starling
Starling (software)
Starling is a light-weight persistent message queue server written in Ruby....
, but since 2009 implementation has been gradually replaced with software written in Scala. The service's application programming interface
Application programming interface
An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
(API) allows other web service
Web service
A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...
s and applications to integrate with Twitter.
Interface
On April 30, 2009, Twitter adjusted its web interface, adding a search bar and a sidebar of "trending topicTrending topic
A trending topic is a word, phrase or topic that is posted multiple times on the social networking and microblogging service Twitter. Trending topics become popular either through a concerted effort by users or because of an event that prompts people to talk about one specific topic...
s" — the most common phrases appearing in messages. Biz Stone
Biz Stone
Christopher Isaac "Biz" Stone is a co-founder and Creative Director of Twitter, Inc and also helped to create and launch Xanga, Blogger, Odeo, and , founded in June 2011 with his long time collaborators Evan Williams and Jason Goldman to focus on building systems that help people work together to...
explains that all messages are instantly indexed
Index (search engine)
Search engine indexing collects, parses, and stores data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, physics, and computer science...
and that "with this newly launched feature, Twitter has become something unexpectedly important — a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now."
Outages
Error message
An error message is information displayed when an unexpected condition occurs, usually on a computer or other device. On modern operating systems with graphical user interfaces, error messages are often displayed using dialog boxes...
image created by Yiying Lu, illustrating eight orange birds using a net to hoist a whale from the ocean captioned "Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again."
Twitter had approximately ninety-eight percent uptime
Uptime
Uptime is a measure of the time a machine has been up without any downtime.It is often used as a measure of computer operating system reliability or stability, in that this time represents the time a computer can be left unattended without crashing, or needing to be rebooted for administrative or...
in 2007 (or about six full days of downtime). The downtime was particularly noticeable during events popular with the technology industry such as the 2008 Macworld Conference & Expo
Macworld Conference & Expo
Produced by Boston-based IDG World Expo, Macworld | iWorld is a trade-show with conference tracks dedicated to the Apple Macintosh platform. It is held annually in the United States, usually during the second week of January...
keynote address
Keynote
A keynote in literature, music, or public speaking establishes the principal underlying theme. In corporate or commercial settings, greater importance is attached to the delivery of a keynote speech or keynote address...
.
- May 2008 – Twitter's new engineering team made architectural changes to deal with the scale of growth. Stability issues resulted in down time or temporary feature removal.
- August 2008 – Twitter withdrew free SMS services from users in the United Kingdom and for approximately five months instant messaging support via a XMPPExtensible Messaging and Presence ProtocolExtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol is an open-standard communications protocol for message-oriented middleware based on XML . The protocol was originally named Jabber, and was developed by the Jabber open-source community in 1999 for near-real-time, extensible instant messaging , presence...
botInternet botInternet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone...
was listed as being "temporarily unavailable". - October 10, 2008 – Twitter's status blog announced that instant messaging (IM)Instant messagingInstant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...
service was no longer a temporary outage and needed to be revamped. It was announced that Twitter aims to return its IM service pending necessary major work. - June 12, 2009 – In what was called a potential "Twitpocalypse", the unique numerical identifierUnique identifierWith reference to a given set of objects, a unique identifier is any identifier which is guaranteed to be unique among all identifiers used for those objects and for a specific purpose...
associated with each tweet exceeded the limit of 32-bit32-bitThe range of integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4,294,967,295. Hence, a processor with 32-bit memory addresses can directly access 4 GB of byte-addressable memory....
signed integersInteger (computer science)In computer science, an integer is a datum of integral data type, a data type which represents some finite subset of the mathematical integers. Integral data types may be of different sizes and may or may not be allowed to contain negative values....
(2,147,483,647 total messages). While Twitter itself was not affected, some third-party clients could no longer access recent tweets. PatchesPatch (computing)A patch is a piece of software designed to fix problems with, or update a computer program or its supporting data. This includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs, and improving the usability or performance...
were quickly released, though some iPhoneIPhoneThe iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
applications had to wait for approval from the App Store.
- June 25, 2009 – Twitter crashed at least once and ran very slowly for some time after It recorded over 50,000 tweets about Michael JacksonMichael JacksonMichael Joseph Jackson was an American recording artist, entertainer, and businessman. Referred to as the King of Pop, or by his initials MJ, Jackson is recognized as the most successful entertainer of all time by Guinness World Records...
’s death in just one hour. Michael Jackson was ranked on seven of the top ten trending topics.
- September 22, 2009 – The identifier exceeded the limit for 32-bit unsigned integers (4,294,967,296 total messages) again breaking some third-party clients.
- August 6, 2009 – Twitter and Facebook suffered from a denial-of-service attackDenial-of-service attackA denial-of-service attack or distributed denial-of-service attack is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users...
, causing the Twitter website to go offline for several hours. It was later confirmed that the attacks were directed at one pro-GeorgianGeorgia (country)Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...
user around the anniversary of the 2008 South Ossetia War2008 South Ossetia warThe 2008 South Ossetia War or Russo-Georgian War was an armed conflict in August 2008 between Georgia on one side, and Russia and separatist governments of South Ossetia and Abkhazia on the other....
, rather than the sites themselves. - December 17, 2009 – A hacking attack replaced the website's welcoming screen with an image of a green flag and the caption "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army" for nearly an hour. No connection between the hackers and Iran has been established.
- June-July 2010 – Twitter has a very high service rejection rate (10%-20%) during 2010 FIFA World Cup2010 FIFA World CupThe 2010 FIFA World Cup was the 19th FIFA World Cup, the world championship for men's national association football teams. It took place in South Africa from 11 June to 11 July 2010...
period, also, the response latency increased a lot. - November 2010 – A number of accounts encountered a fault that resulted in them seeing the "fail whale" when they tried to login to their accounts. The accounts themselves were not locked out as account holders could still see their "mentions" page and post from there. But the timeline and a number of other features were unavailable during this outage.
Privacy and security
Twitter messages are public but users can also send private messages. Twitter collects personally identifiable informationPersonally identifiable information
Personally Identifiable Information , as used in information security, is information that can be used to uniquely identify, contact, or locate a single person or can be used with other sources to uniquely identify a single individual...
about its users and shares it with third parties. The service reserves the right to sell this information as an asset if the company changes hands. While Twitter displays no advertising, advertisers can target
Behavioral targeting
Behavioral targeting is a technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns.Behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual's web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select...
users based on their history of tweets and may quote tweets in ads directed specifically to the user.
A security vulnerability was reported on April 7, 2007, by Nitesh Dhanjani and Rujith. Since Twitter used the phone number
Telephone number
A telephone number or phone number is a sequence of digits used to call from one telephone line to another in a public switched telephone network. When telephone numbers were invented, they were short — as few as one, two or three digits — and were given orally to a switchboard operator...
of the sender of an SMS
SMS
SMS is a form of text messaging communication on phones and mobile phones. The terms SMS or sms may also refer to:- Computer hardware :...
message as authentication, malicious users could update someone else's status page by using SMS spoofing
SMS spoofing
SMS spoofing is a relatively new technology which uses the short message service , available on most mobile phones and personal digital assistants, to set who the message appears to come from by replacing the originating mobile number with alphanumeric text...
. The vulnerability could be used if the spoofer knew the phone number registered to their victim's account. Within a few weeks of this discovery Twitter introduced an optional personal identification number
Personal identification number
A personal identification number is a secret numeric password shared between a user and a system that can be used to authenticate the user to the system. Typically, the user is required to provide a non-confidential user identifier or token and a confidential PIN to gain access to the system...
(PIN) that its users could use to authenticate their SMS-originating messages.
On January 5, 2009, 33 high-profile Twitter accounts were compromised after a Twitter administrator's password was guessed by a dictionary attack
Dictionary attack
In cryptanalysis and computer security, a dictionary attack is a technique for defeating a cipher or authentication mechanism by trying to determine its decryption key or passphrase by searching likely possibilities.-Technique:...
. Falsified tweets — including sexually explicit and drug-related messages — were sent from these accounts.
Twitter launched the beta version of their "Verified Accounts" service on June 11, 2009, allowing famous or notable people to announce their Twitter account name. The home pages of these accounts display a badge indicating their status.
In May 2010, a bug was discovered by İnci Sözlük users that allowed Twitter users to force others to follow them without the other users' consent or knowledge. For example, comedian Conan O'Brien
Conan O'Brien
Conan Christopher O'Brien is an American television host, comedian, writer, producer and performer. Since November 2010 he has hosted Conan, a late-night talk show that airs on the American cable television station TBS....
's account, which had been set to follow only one person, was changed to receive nearly 200 malicious subscriptions.
In response to Twitter's security breaches, the Federal Trade Commission
Federal Trade Commission
The Federal Trade Commission is an independent agency of the United States government, established in 1914 by the Federal Trade Commission Act...
brought charges against the service which were settled on June 24, 2010. This was the first time the FTC had taken action against a social network for security lapses. The settlement requires Twitter to take a number of steps to secure users' private information, including maintenance of a "comprehensive information security program" to be independently audited biannually.
On December 14, 2010, the United States Department of Justice
United States Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice , is the United States federal executive department responsible for the enforcement of the law and administration of justice, equivalent to the justice or interior ministries of other countries.The Department is led by the Attorney General, who is nominated...
issued a subpoena directing Twitter
Twitter subpoena
On 14 December 2010, the United States Department of Justice issued a subpoena accompanied by a national security letter to Twitter in relation to ongoing investigations of WikiLeaks...
to provide information for accounts registered to or associated with WikiLeaks
Wikileaks
WikiLeaks is an international self-described not-for-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organisation, claimed a database of more...
. Twitter decided to notify its users and said in a statement, "...it's our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so".
A "MouseOver" exploit occurred on September 21, 2010, when an XSS Worm
XSS Worm
An XSS worm, sometimes referred to as a cross site scripting virus, is a malicious payload, usually written in JavaScript, that propagates among visitors of a website in the attempt to progressively infect other visitors...
became active on Twitter. When an account user
User (computing)
A user is an agent, either a human agent or software agent, who uses a computer or network service. A user often has a user account and is identified by a username , screen name , nickname , or handle, which is derived from the identical Citizen's Band radio term.Users are...
held the mouse cursor over
Mouseover
In computing a mouseover, mouse hover or hover box refers to a GUI event that is raised when the user moves or "hovers" the cursor over a particular area of the GUI. The technique is particularly common in web browsers where the URL of a hyperlink can be viewed in the status bar...
blacked out parts of a tweet, the worm within the script would automatically open links and re-post itself on the reader's account. The exploit was then re-used to post pop-up ads and links to pornographic sites. The origin is unclear but Pearce H. Delphin (known on Twitter as @zzap) and a Scandinavian developer, Magnus Holm, both claim to have modified the exploit of a user, possibly Masato Kinugawa, who was using it to create coloured Tweets. Kinugawa, a Japanese developer, reported the XSS vulnerability to Twitter on August 14. Later, when he found it was exploitable again, he created the account 'RainbowTwtr' and used it to post coloured messages. Delphin says he exposed the security flaw by tweeting a JavaScript function for "onMouseOver", and Holm later created and posted the XSS Worm
XSS Worm
An XSS worm, sometimes referred to as a cross site scripting virus, is a malicious payload, usually written in JavaScript, that propagates among visitors of a website in the attempt to progressively infect other visitors...
that automatically re-tweeted itself. Security firm Sophos reported the virus was spread by people doing it for "fun and games", but noted it could be exploited by cybercriminals. Twitter issued a statement on their status blog at 13:50 UTC that "The exploit is fully patched". Twitter representative Carolyn Penner said no charges would be pressed.
In May 2011, a claimant known as "CTB" (subsequently identified as Ryan Giggs
Ryan Giggs
Ryan Joseph Giggs OBE is a Welsh professional footballer who plays for Manchester United. Giggs made his first appearance for the club during the 1990–91 season and has been a regular player since the 1991–92 season...
) in the case of CTB v Twitter Inc., Persons Unknown
CTB v News Group Newspapers
CTB v News Group Newspapers is an English legal case between Manchester United player Ryan Giggs, given the pseudonym CTB, and defendants News Group Newspapers Limited and model Imogen Thomas....
took legal action at the High Court of Justice
High Court of Justice
The High Court of Justice is, together with the Court of Appeal and the Crown Court, one of the Senior Courts of England and Wales...
in London against Twitter., requesting that Twitter release details of account holders. This followed gossip
Gossip
Gossip is idle talk or rumour, especially about the personal or private affairs of others, It is one of the oldest and most common means of sharing facts and views, but also has a reputation for the introduction of errors and variations into the information transmitted...
posted on Twitter about Giggs' private life, causing conflict relating to privacy injunctions
2011 British privacy injunctions controversy
The British privacy injunctions controversy began in early 2011, when London-based tabloid newspapers published stories about anonymous celebrities that were intended to flout what are commonly known in English law as super-injunctions, where the claimant could not be named, and carefully omitting...
.
On May 29, 2011, it was reported that South Tyneside
South Tyneside
South Tyneside is a metropolitan borough in Tyne and Wear in North East England.It is bordered by four other boroughs - Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead to the west, Sunderland in the south, and North Tyneside to the north. The border county of Northumberland lies further north...
council in England had successfully taken legal action against Twitter in a court in California, which forced Twitter to reveal the details of five user accounts. The council was trying to discover the identity of a blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
ger called "Mr Monkey" who allegedly posted libellous statements about three local councillors.
Open source
Twitter released several open sourceOpen source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
projects developed while overcoming technical challenges of their service. Notable projects are the Gizzard Scala framework
Gizzard (scala framework)
Gizzard is an open source sharding framework to create custom fault-tolerant, distributed databases. It was initially used by Twitter and emerged out of a wide variety of data storage problems. Gizzard operates as a middleware networking service that runs on the Java Virtual Machine...
for creating distributed datastores and the distributed graph database FlockDB
FlockDB
FlockDB is an open source distributed, fault-tolerant graph database for managing data at webscale. It was initially used by Twitter to build its database of users and manage their relationships to one another...
.
URL shortener
t.co is a URL shorteningURL shortening
URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a Uniform Resource Locator may be made substantially shorter in length and still direct to the required page. This is achieved by using an HTTP Redirect on a domain name that is short, which links to the web page that has a long URL...
service created by Twitter. It is only available for links posted to Twitter and not available for general use. Eventually all links posted to Twitter will use a t.co wrapper. Twitter hopes that the service will be able to protect users from malicious sites, and will use it to track clicks on links within tweets.
Having previously used the services of third parties TinyURL
TinyURL
TinyURL is a URL shortening service, a web service that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs. Kevin Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 so that he would be able to link directly to newsgroup postings that frequently had long and cumbersome addresses.-...
and bit.ly
Bit.ly
bitly is a URL shortening service owned by bitly, Inc., a betaworks company. It is especially popular on microblogging website Twitter because it is the default URL shortening service on the website since May 6, 2009, replacing TinyURL...
, Twitter began experimenting with its own URL shortening service for direct messages in March 2010 using the twt.tl domain, before it purchased the t.co domain. The service was tested on the main site using the accounts @TwitterAPI, @rsarver and @raffi. On September 2, 2010, an email from Twitter to users said they would be expanding the roll-out of the service to users. On June 7, 2011, Twitter announced that it was rolling out the feature.
Integrated photo-sharing service
On June 1, 2011, Twitter announced its own integrated photo-sharing service that enables users to upload a photo and attach it to a Tweet right from Twitter.com. Users now also have the ability to add pictures to Twitter's search by adding hashtags to the tweet. Twitter also plans to provide photo galleries designed to gather and syndicate all photos that a user has uploaded on Twitter and third-party services such as TwitPic.Decentralized architecture
The traditional centralized client-server architecture has not scaled with user demand, leading to server overload and significant loss of availability. There is some decentralized architecture to enhance the scalability of Twitter including Fethr and Cuckoo.Use and social impact
Twitter has been used for a variety of purposes in many different industries and scenarios. For example, it has been used to organize protests, sometimes referred to as "Twitter Revolutions" and which include the 2011 Egyptian revolution2011 Egyptian revolution
The 2011 Egyptian revolution took place following a popular uprising that began on Tuesday, 25 January 2011 and is still continuing as of November 2011. The uprising was mainly a campaign of non-violent civil resistance, which featured a series of demonstrations, marches, acts of civil...
, 2010–2011 Tunisian protests, 2009–2010 Iranian election protests, and 2009 Moldova civil unrest
2009 Moldova civil unrest
The 2009 civil unrest in Moldova began on April 7, 2009, in major cities of Moldova before the results of the 2009 Moldovan parliamentary election were announced...
. The governments of Iran and Egypt blocked the service in retaliation. The service is also used as a form of civil disobedience
Civil disobedience
Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a government, or of an occupying international power. Civil disobedience is commonly, though not always, defined as being nonviolent resistance. It is one form of civil resistance...
: in 2010, users expressed outrage over the Twitter Joke Trial by making obvious jokes about terrorism; and in the British privacy injunction debate
2011 British privacy injunctions controversy
The British privacy injunctions controversy began in early 2011, when London-based tabloid newspapers published stories about anonymous celebrities that were intended to flout what are commonly known in English law as super-injunctions, where the claimant could not be named, and carefully omitting...
in the same country a year later, where several celebrities that had taken out anonymised injunctions, most notably the Manchester United player Ryan Giggs
Ryan Giggs
Ryan Joseph Giggs OBE is a Welsh professional footballer who plays for Manchester United. Giggs made his first appearance for the club during the 1990–91 season and has been a regular player since the 1991–92 season...
, were identified by thousands of users in protest to traditional journalism being censored.
Twitter is also increasingly used for making TV more interactive and social. This effect is sometimes referred to as the "virtual watercooler" or social television
Social television
Social Television is a general term for technology that supports communication and social interaction in either the context of watching television, or related to TV content. It also includes the study of television-related social behavior, devices and networks...
. Twitter has been used successfully to encourage people to watch live TV events, such as the Oscars, the Super Bowl
Super Bowl
The Super Bowl is the championship game of the National Football League , the highest level of professional American football in the United States, culminating a season that begins in the late summer of the previous calendar year. The Super Bowl uses Roman numerals to identify each game, rather...
and the MTV Video Music Awards; this strategy has however proven less effective with regularly scheduled TV shows. Such direct cross-promotions have been banned from French television due to regulations against secret advertising.
In May 2008, The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
wrote that social networking services such as Twitter "elicit mixed feelings in the technology-savvy people who have been their early adopters
Diffusion (business)
Diffusion is the process by which a new idea or new product is accepted by the market. The rate of diffusion is the speed that the new idea spreads from one consumer to the next. Adoption is similar to diffusion except that it deals with the psychological processes an individual goes through,...
. Fans say they are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel 'too' connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they're having for dinner."
Tech writer Bruce Sterling
Bruce Sterling
Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre.-Writings:...
opined in 2007 that using Twitter for "literate communication" is "about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite the Iliad
Iliad
The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...
". In September 2008, the journalist Clive Thompson
Clive Thompson (journalist)
Clive Thompson is a Canadian freelance journalist, blogger and science and technology writer.Thompson graduated from the University of Toronto with majors in political science and English...
mused in a The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine is a Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of The New York Times. It is host to feature articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors...
editorial that the service had expanded narcissism into "a new, supermetabolic extreme—the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world." Conversely, Vancouver Sun columnist Steve Dotto
Steve Dotto
-Television Experience:Steve Dotto hosts a television show called Dotto Tech and formerly hosted shows called Dotto on Data and Dotto's Data Cafe. The main theme of his show is technology usually centred around computers but has ventured into other areas such as televisions and video equipment...
opined that part of Twitter's appeal is the challenge of trying to publish such messages in tight constraints, and Jonathan Zittrain
Jonathan Zittrain
Jonathan L. Zittrain is a US professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and a faculty co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society...
, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
, said that "the qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful".
In 2009, Nielsen Online
Nielsen Online
Nielsen Online, a service of the Nielsen Company, provides measurement and analysis of online audiences, advertising, video, consumer-generated media, word of mouth, commerce and consumer behavior. Previously a majority investor in both companies, Nielsen purchased NetRatings and BuzzMetrics in the...
reported that Twitter has a user retention rate of forty percent. Many people stop using the service after a month, therefore the site may potentially reach only about ten percent of all Internet users
Global internet usage
Global Internet usage provides information on the number of people who use the Internet by language, nationality, geography, etc.-Languages used on the Internet:Most web pages on the Internet are in English....
. In 2009, Twitter won the "Breakout of the Year" Webby Award. During a February 2009 discussion on National Public Radio
NPR
NPR, formerly National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting...
's Weekend Edition
Weekend Edition
Weekend Edition is the name given to a set of American radio news magazines produced and distributed by National Public Radio . It is the weekend counterpart to Morning Edition. It consists of Weekend Edition Saturday and Weekend Edition Sunday , each of which airs for two hours, from 8 a.m. to 10...
, the journalist Daniel Schorr
Daniel Schorr
Daniel Louis Schorr was an American journalist who covered world news for more than 60 years. He was most recently a Senior News Analyst for National Public Radio...
stated that Twitter accounts of events lacked rigorous fact-checking and other editorial improvements. In response, Andy Carvin
Andy Carvin
Andy Carvin is National Public Radio's senior product manager for online communities. Carvin was the founding editor and former coordinator of the Digital Divide Network, an online community of more than 10,000 Internet activists in over 140 countries working to bridge the digital divide...
gave Schorr two examples of breaking news
Breaking news
Breaking news, also known as a special report or news bulletin, is a current event that broadcasters feel warrants the interruption of scheduled programming and/or current news in order to report its details. Many times, breaking news is used after the news network has already reported on this story...
stories that played out on Twitter and said users wanted first-hand accounts and sometimes debunked stories. Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine acknowledged growing level of influence in its 2010 Time 100
Time 100
Time 100 is an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, as assembled by Time. First published in 1999 as a result of a debate among several academics, the list has become an annual event.-History and format:...
; to determine the influence of people, it used a formula based on famous social networking sites, Twitter and Facebook. The list ranges from Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
and Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her self-titled, multi-award-winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011...
to Lady Gaga
Lady GaGa
Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta , better known by her stage name Lady Gaga, is an American singer and songwriter. Born and raised in New York City, she primarily studied at the Convent of the Sacred Heart and briefly attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts before withdrawing to...
and Ashton Kutcher
Ashton Kutcher
Christopher Ashton Kutcher , best known as Ashton Kutcher, is an American actor, producer, former fashion model and comedian, best known for his portrayal of Michael Kelso in the Fox sitcom That '70s Show...
.
After claims in the media that the hashtags #wikileaks
Wikileaks
WikiLeaks is an international self-described not-for-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organisation, claimed a database of more...
and #occupywallstreet
Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Wall Street is an ongoing series of demonstrations initiated by the Canadian activist group Adbusters which began September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district...
were being censored because they did not show up on the site's list of trending topics, Twitter responded by stating that it does not censor hashtags unless they contain obscenities.
Reception
In 2006, when Twitter launched under the name "Twttr", Michael ArringtonMichael Arrington
J. Michael Arrington is the founder and former co-editor of TechCrunch, a blog covering the Silicon Valley technology start-up communities and the wider technology field in USA and elsewhere...
of TechCrunch
TechCrunch
TechCrunch is a web publication that offers technology news and analysis, as well as profiling of startup companies, products, and websites. It was founded by Michael Arrington in 2005, and was first published on June 11, 2005....
commented that although he liked the service, he also noted that he felt uncomfortable with the fact that every user's Twitter page is available to the public.
Change of focus
Twitter emphasized its news and information-network strategy in November 2009 by changing the question asked to users for status updates from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?" Entertainment WeeklyEntertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
put it on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "Limiting yourself to 140 characters—the maximum for messages on this diabolically addictive social-networking tool—is easy."
On November 22, 2010, Biz Stone
Biz Stone
Christopher Isaac "Biz" Stone is a co-founder and Creative Director of Twitter, Inc and also helped to create and launch Xanga, Blogger, Odeo, and , founded in June 2011 with his long time collaborators Evan Williams and Jason Goldman to focus on building systems that help people work together to...
, a cofounder of the company, expressed for the first time the idea of a Twitter news network, a concept of wire-like news service he has been working on for years.
See also
- Ambient awarenessAmbient AwarenessAmbient awareness is a term used by social scientists to describe a new form of peripheral social awareness. This awareness is propagated from relatively constant contact with one's friends and colleagues via social networking platforms on the Internet. Some examples of social networking websites...
- BlaukBlaukBlauk.com is a microblogging website that lets users to express their thoughts to a stranger or acquaintance they see everyday at public places. Blauk.com ensures that the people being talked about can read these thoughts and allows people to read what strangers think of them...
- Comparison of microblogging services
- CTB v News Group NewspapersCTB v News Group NewspapersCTB v News Group Newspapers is an English legal case between Manchester United player Ryan Giggs, given the pseudonym CTB, and defendants News Group Newspapers Limited and model Imogen Thomas....
- HeelloHeelloHeello is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts and to share pictures and videos. It was launched on August 10, 2011, by Noah Everett , exactly one day after twitter rolled out its official photo-sharing app...
- List of Twitter services and applications
- List of virtual communities with more than 100 million users
- MyspaceMyspaceMyspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....
- TumblrTumblrTumblr is a website and microblogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog. Users can follow other users, or choose to make their tumblelog private. The service emphasizes ease of use. The site ranks as the 10th...
- Web 2.0 Suicide MachineWeb 2.0 Suicide MachineThe Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is a service that helps users tired of Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, to "commit suicide in social networks," by automatically "removing their private content and friend relationships," .To start the suicide process, the user has to provide his login credential...
External links
- Twitter Demographics and Audience Profile at QuantcastQuantcastQuantcast is a California based company that provides publishers and marketers with the ability to understand, deliver and reach their best audiences at a massive scale...
- Twitter in Depth Archive by The Daily TelegraphThe Daily TelegraphThe Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
- The Library of Congress is Archiving Your Tweets – audio report by NPRNPRNPR, formerly National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting...
- Twittermania sweeps Russia's politicians (RT article)
- Outrageous Tweets: A Short History - slideshow by Life magazine