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Twitter
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Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service. It enables its users to send and read other users' updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default).
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Encyclopedia
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service. It enables its users to send and read other users' updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can send and receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS (receive only), or through applications such as Tweetie, Twitterrific, and Feedalizr. The service is free to use over the web, but using SMS may incur phone services provider fees.
Four gateway numbers are currently available for SMS: short codes for the United States, Canada, and India, and a United Kingdom-based number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email.
Estimates of the number of daily users vary as the company does not release the number of active accounts. In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million users. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third largest social network (MySpace would be second and Facebook would be the largest in the world), and puts the number of users at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visitors at 55 million.
History
Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. It began in March 2006 as a research and development project inside San Francisco podcasting company Odeo. Odeo was co-founded by Noah Glass and blogger Evan Williams. In October 2006, the company was bought out by management, and Williams, Stone, and other Odeo employees started another company named Obvious Corp. to operate Odeo and Twitter, another startup Williams had been testing in the offices for about a year. Twitter had been initially used internally by Odeo's employees and became a product of Obvious at this time.
The service rapidly gained popularity: In March 2007, it won the 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category. Dorsey, the man behind the concept of Twitter, gave the following playful acceptance speech at SXSW: "We'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"
In April 2007, Obvious spun off the service as a separate entity under the name Twitter, Inc., with Dorsey as CEO and Williams as Chairman until October 2008 when Williams and Dorsey switched places.
"Summize" was an internet startup using the Twitter XMPP stream to allow users to search twitter conversations in near real-time. On 15 July 2008, Twitter acquired Summize and rolled it into their own site at the subdomain search.twitter.com. At the time of the sale, Summize had 6 employees, of which 5 went on to work at Twitter. CEO Jay Verdy moved on to a new project.
Japanese version
On April 22, 2008, Twitter announced on its blog that it had created a version of Twitter for Japanese users, because they are prominent users of the service, despite the user interface being completely in English. One week after its launch it was reported that the Japanese version of Twitter had started gaining users; Japanese is now the second most-used language on Twitter. Unlike the English language service, the Japanese service is supported by advertising.
Reactions
Twitter began experiencing problems related to its growing number of users in 2007. The service has experienced outages resulting from traffic overloads due to its increased popularity. The Wall Street Journal wrote, "These social-networking services 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." Satirical references have also been made, such as speculations as to what Shakespeare and Freud might tweet, if they used Twitter.
In March 2009 Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury strip began to satirise Twitter, with the strip characters ironically highlighting the triviality of "tweets" and Roland defending the need to keep up with the constant-update trend or else lose relevance. A later Doonesbury strip contained a joke about Twitter that was similar to an April 2008 strip of the webcomic Penny Arcade.
The Daily Show
The Daily Show on Comedy Central has been notably critical of Twitter. During a March 2, 2009 episode of the Daily Show, Jon Stewart (the host of the Daily Show) proudly admitted to not knowing how Twitter works and negatively portrayed members of Congress who chose to "twitter" during President Obama's address to Congress (on February 24, 2009) rather than pay attention to the content of the speech. The Daily Show's Samantha Bee satirised the service and its media coverage saying "there's no surprise young people love it - according to reports of young people by middle aged people". Jon Stewart described the service as a gimmick.
Another episode of the Daily Show on February 26, 2009 during which host of NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams (a guest on the Daily Show and a journalist) derided "tweets" as only having subject matter which refers to the condition of the author in any given instant. Mr. Williams implied that he would never use Twitter because nothing he did at any given moment was interesting enough to publish in Twitter format.
Finances
About USD 57 million of Twitter is owned by venture capitalists. Williams raised about USD 22 million in venture capital. Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions (led by Jeff Bezos of Amazon). Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital backed Twitter in 2009, investing an additional USD 35 million.The Industry Standard has pointed to its lack of revenue as limiting its long-term viability.
Privacy and security
Twitter collects personally identifiable information about its users and shares it with third parties. Twitter considers that information an asset, and reserves the right to sell it if the company changes hands.
A security vulnerability was reported on April 7, 2007, by Nitesh Dhanjani & Rujith. The problem was due to Twitter's using the SMS message originator as the authentication of the user's account. Nitesh used fakemytext.com to spoof a text message, whereupon Twitter posted the message on the victim's page. This vulnerability can only be used if the victim's phone number is known. Within a few weeks of this discovery Twitter introduced an optional PIN that its users can specify to authenticate SMS-originating messages.
On January 5, 2009, 33 high-profile Twitter accounts were compromised, and falsified messages—including sexually explicit and drug-related messages—were sent. The accounts were compromised after a Twitter administrator's password was guessed via a dictionary attack.
Technology
Users perpetually answer the question, "What are you doing?" However, in an interview published in March 2009, Twitter CEO Evan Williams said that the company was thinking about changing this question,. Twitter is something like a web-based IRC client. The Twitter web interface uses the Ruby on Rails framework. From the spring of 2007 until sometime in 2008 the actual messages were handled by a pure-Ruby light-weight persistent queue server called Starling. Starling was replaced in 2008 with Scarling, a light-weight persistent queue server written in the Scala programming language, which has since been renamed Kestrel. The Twitter API itself allows the integration of Twitter with other web services and applications. In late April 2008, TechCrunch reported that, due to downtime related to scaling problems, Twitter would abandon Ruby on Rails as their web framework and start from scratch with PHP or Java. Evan Williams, however, soon debunked this report in a Tweet he sent on May 1, 2008.
Twitter messages may be tagged using hashtags, a word or phrase prefixed with a #, such as #beer. This enables tweets on a specific subject to be found by simply searching for their common hashtag, provided that the user has tagged his or her tweet.
Outages
Twitter experienced approximately 98% uptime in 2007, or about seven full days of downtime. Twitter's downtime was particularly noticeable during events popular with the technology industry, such as the 2008 Macworld Conference & Expo keynote address.
When Twitter crashes, users see the "fail whale" error message created by Sydney artist and designer Yiying Lu, a whimsical illustration of red birds using nets to hoist a whale from the ocean. The message reads: "Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again." The fail whale has been featured on NPR. During May 2008 Twitter's new engineering team implemented necessary architectural changes to deal with the scale of growth. Stability issues resulted in down time or temporary feature removal.
As of August 2008, Twitter withdrew free SMS services to users in most of the world. For approximately five months, instant messaging support via a Jabber "bot" was listed as being "temporarily unavailable". On October 10, 2008, Twitter's status blog announced that IM service was no longer a temporary outage and needed to be revamped. IM status is said to return at some point, but requires major work to be completed. Twitter service issues and resolutions can be tracked via their status page at http://status.twitter.com/.
In media
On April 10, 2008, James Buck, a graduate journalism student at UC Berkeley, and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were arrested in Egypt for photographing an anti-government protest. On his way to the police station Buck used his mobile phone to send the message “Arrested” to his 48 "followers" on Twitter. Those contacted UC Berkeley, the US Embassy in Cairo, and a number of press organizations on his behalf. Buck was able to send updates about his condition to his "followers" while being detained. He was released the next day from the Mahalla jail after the college hired a lawyer for him.
Research reported in New Scientist in May 2008 found that blogs, maps, photo sites and instant messaging systems like Twitter did a better job of getting information out during emergencies such as the shootings at Virginia Tech than either the traditional news media or government emergency services. The study — performed by researchers at the — also found that those using Twitter during the fires in California in October 2007 kept their followers (who were often friends and neighbors) informed of their whereabouts and of the location of various fires minute by minute. Additionally, organizations that support relief efforts are also using Twitter. The American Red Cross uses Twitter () to exchange minute-to-minute information about local disasters, including statistics and directions.
The first trades union Twitter service was launched by the news and campaigning website LabourStart in June 2008
Some media outlets are also starting to use Twitter as a source of public sentiment on issues, and are using the technology in order to deliver real-time or recent-time opinions that are not sent to them directly. A specific example occurred during the CBC News television coverage of the Canadian federal election on October 14, 2008. During the broadcast, the CBC cited a graph (produced by the Infoscape Research Lab) of items mentioned on Twitter, along with Tweets regarding Elizabeth May and Stéphane Dion, the majority of the Dion Tweets calling for him to step down in response to the election results. In 2008, CNN began setting up Twitter pages for some of its anchors and reading tweets during broadcasts. Rick Sanchez and Don Lemon prominently feature updates from Twitter followers during their broadcasts.
During the 2008 Mumbai attacks, eyewitnesses sent an estimated 80 tweets every five seconds as the tragedy unfolded. Twitter users on the ground helped in compiling a list of the dead and injured. In addition, users sent out vital information such as emergency phone numbers and the location of hospitals that needed blood donations. In January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 experienced multiple bird strikes and had to be ditched in the Hudson River after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport in New York City. Janis Krums, a passenger on one of the ferries that rushed to help, took a picture of the downed plane as passengers were still evacuating and tweeted it via TwitPic before traditional media arrived at the scene. In February 2009, the Country Fire Authority used Twitter to send out regular alerts and updates regarding the 2009 Victorian bushfires. During this time, the Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, also used his Twitter account to send out information on the fires, how to donate money and blood, and where to seek emergency help.
In October 2008 a draft US Army intelligence report identified the popular micro-blogging service as a potential terrorist tool. The report said, "Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives."
Similar services
A number of Twitter-like services exist, including sending text messages to multiple people at once. Other services use a similar concept but add country-specific services or combine the micro-blogging facilities with other services, such as file sharing (e.g., Jaiku). In May 2007, one source counted as many as 111 such "Twitter look-alikes" internationally. Despite Twitter efforts to localize, Chinese-language Twitter clones have far outdone Twitter's own progress in China. Yammer, which launched at the TechCrunch 50 conference on September 8, 2008, is touted as an enterprise version of Twitter.
Prominent users
David Saranga of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that on December 30, 2008, Israel would be the first government to hold a worldwide press conference via Twitter to take questions from the public about the war on Gaza. Large Businesses such as Cisco Systems, Jet Blue, Sun Microsystems, IBM and Whole Foods Market use Twitter to provide product or service information. The Los Angeles Fire Department put the technology to use during the October 2007 California wildfires. NASA used Twitter to break the news of the discovery of what appeared to be water ice on Mars by the Phoenix Mars Lander. Other NASA projects, such as Space Shuttle missions and the International Space Station, also provide updates via Twitter. News sources such as the BBC, NPR, and other outlets use Twitter to disseminate breaking news or provide information feeds for sporting events. Several 2008 U.S. presidential campaigns used Twitter as a publicity mechanism, including that of Democratic Party nominee and President Barack Obama. The Nader/Gonzalez campaign updated their ballot access teams in real-time with Twitter and Google Maps. Twitter use increased 43% on election day.
10 Downing Street, the website of the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has started using Twitter. The use of Twitter by victims, bystanders, and the public to gather news and coordinate responses to the November 2008 Mumbai siege led CNN to call it "the day that social media appeared to come of age."
Various pop culture icons and celebrities, such as Lance Armstrong, John Mayer, John Cleese, Mike Gordon, Gary Vaynerchuk, Kevin Rose, Jordan Kensington, Jonathan Ross, Richard Bacon, Pete Wentz, Will Carling, Robert Llewellyn, Alan Carr, Phill Jupitus, Shaquille O'Neal, Lupe Fiasco, Philip Schofield, Taylor Swift, Greg Grunberg, Gregg "Opie" Hughes, Coldplay, Dr. Drew Pinsky, Britney Spears, Mark Hoppus, Backstreet Boys, Stephen Fry, Chris Moyles, Justin Hawkins, Adam Ficek, Soleil Moon Frye, Demi Lovato, Joe Jonas, David Henrie, Miley Cyrus, James Morrison, Christina Aguilera, Ashton Kutcher, Tony Hawk, Mariah Carey, Alan Davies, Demi Moore, Tom Felton and Lily Allen use Twitter to communicate with fans. Recently Tina Fey's Twitter account has been revealed as a fake.
Sir Richard Branson has a Twitter account and advertises jobs for Virgin on it. Dutch Minister of Foreign affairs Maxime Verhagen is a regular user of Twitter. Smith College uses Twitter for updates and facts. The College of Computing of Georgia Institute of Technology and the College of Engineering of University of Texas at San Antonio have been using Twitter to send information to their students. The Faculty of Psychology of the University of Vienna has been using Twitter for formative course evaluation.
See also
External links
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