From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The twitter bird logo often seen around the website
Twitter is a free
social networking and
micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others' updates, known as
tweets. Tweets are
text-based posts of up to 140 characters, displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to other users - known as followers - who have subscribed to them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website,
Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. The service is free over the Internet, but using SMS may incur phone service provider fees.
.
.
Through SMS, users can communicate with Twitter through five
gateway numbers:
short codes for the United States, Canada, India,
New Zealand, and an
Isle of Man-based number for international use. There is also a short code in the United Kingdom which is only accessible to those in the
Vodafone network.
[3]
Alexa ranks the site 27th in terms of
web traffic.
[4] Estimates of the number of daily users vary, because the company does not release the number of active accounts. However, a February 2009
Compete.com blog entry ranked Twitter as the third most used social network,
[5] which puts the number of unique monthly visitors at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visits at 55 million;
[5] however, only 40% of users are retained.
[6] In March 2009, a
Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing site in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had a monthly growth of 1382%,
Zimbio of 240%, followed by
Facebook with an increase of 228%.
[7]
History
A circa 2000 blueprint sketch by Jack Dorsey, envisioning a SMS-based social network.
The birth of Twitter materialized out of a "daylong brainstorming session" where board members of the podcasting company
Odeo, in an attempt to break out of a creative slump, broke up into teams to come up with ideas. During this session,
Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of a service that used
SMS to tell small groups what an individual was doing, partly inspired by
TXTMob, an sms group messaging project which is now defunct.
.
The working name was just "Status" for a while. It actually didn’t have a name. We were trying to name it, and mobile was a big aspect of the product early on ... We liked the SMS aspect, and how you could update from anywhere and receive from anywhere.
.
We wanted to capture that in the name -- we wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word "twitch," because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But "twitch" is not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word "twitter," and it was just perfect. The definition was "a short burst of inconsequential information," and "chirps from birds." And that’s exactly what the product was.
The original product name/codename for the service was named
twttr; inspired by
Flickr and the fact that American SMS
short codes are five characters. The developers prototyped with “10958″ as short code, later changing 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 12:50 PM PST: "just setting up my twttr".
[10]
.
The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for
Odeo employees, later launching publicly into a full-scale version in July 2006. In October 2006,
Biz Stone,
Evan Williams, Dorsey and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corp and acquired Odeo and all of its assets - including Odeo.com and Twitter.com - from the investors and other shareholders.
[11] Twitter later spun off into its own company in April 2007.
[12]
.
The
tipping point for Twitter's popularity came at the 2007
South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in
Austin, Texas. During the event, usage tripled from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000.
[13] According to Laughing Squid blogger Scott Beale, Twitter "absolutely rul[ed]" SXSW. Social software researcher
Danah Boyd said Twitter "own[ed]" the festival.
[14] "The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages," according to
Newsweek's
Steven Levy. "Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it. Soon everyone was buzzing and posting about this new thing that was sort of instant messaging and sort of blogging and maybe even a bit of sending a stream of telegrams."
[15] Also at the festival, Twitter won the SXSW Web Award. The team said, "We'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"
[16]
Finances
Twitter's San Francisco headquarters located on the 4th floor of 539 Bryant Street.
Twitter has raised
US$57 million from
venture capitalists. CEO Evan Williams raised about $22 million in venture capital.
[17] Twitter is backed by
Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions (led by
Jeff Bezos of Amazon).
[18] Institutional Venture Partners and
Benchmark Capital backed Twitter in 2009, investing an additional $35 million.
The Industry Standard has pointed to its lack of revenue as limiting its long-term viability.
[19] On February 13, 2009, Twitter announced on its official blog
[20] that it had closed a third round of funding in which it secured more than $35 million.
[21] Twitter board member Todd Chaffee forecast that the company could make money from
e-commerce. Chaffee noted that many users are already using Twitter to get product recommendations and companies are using the service to promote their products so it would follow that people might want to buy items straight from the site.
[22]
Technology
Twitter's San Francisco offices on 539 Bryant Street.
.
Twitter has been described as akin to a Web-based
IRC client.
[23] The Twitter Web interface uses the
Ruby on Rails framework
[24] and from the spring of 2007 until 2008 the actual messages were handled by a pure-Ruby persistent queue server called
Starling.
[25] Starling was replaced in 2008 with a new
persistent queue server written in the
Scala programming language.
[26] The Twitter
API itself allows the integration of Twitter with other
web services and applications.
[27] Twitter allows the use of
hashtags, a word or phrase prefixed with a
#, such as
#beer.[28] This enables tweets on a specific subject to be found by simply searching for their common hashtag. Similarly, the
@ sign followed by a
username, such as
@example, allows users to send messages directly to each other.
[29] A message preceded by the
@username prefix can still be read by anyone, but is primarily treated as being directed at the user in question.
.
Privacy and security
.
Twitter collects
personally identifiable information about its users and shares it with third parties. The service considers that information an asset, and reserves the right to sell it if the company changes hands.
[30]
.
A security vulnerability was reported on April 7, 2007, by Nitesh Dhanjani and Rujith. The problem was due to Twitter using the
phone number of the senders of
SMS messages as authentication. Nitesh used FakeMyText to
spoof a text message, whereupon Twitter posted the message on the victim's page.
[31] The vulnerability could only 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 specify to authenticate SMS-originating messages.
[32]
.
On January 5, 2009, 33 high-profile Twitter accounts were compromised after a Twitter administrator's password was guessed by a
dictionary attack.
[33] Falsified tweets—including sexually explicit and drug-related messages—were then sent from the accounts.
[34]
.
Twitter launched the beta of its Verified Accounts service on June 11, 2009 allowing famous or notable people to make it clear which Twitter account belongs to them. The home pages of these verified accounts displays a badge to indicate this special status.
[35]
Reception
.
Twitter's popularity exploded in 2007 which resulted in outages from traffic overloads.
[36] 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. However, 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."
[37]"Using Twitter for literate communication is about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite ‘The Iliad,’" said tech writer
Bruce Sterling.
[38] On the other hand,
Steve Dotto opines that part of Twitter's appeal is the challenge of trying to publish such messages in tight constraints.
[39] "The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful," says
Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School.
[40]
.
According to
Nielsen Online, Twitter has a 40% retention rate of users, who tend to drop the service after a month, meaning the site could potentially reach only about 10% of
Internet users.
[41]
.
.
Outages
.
Twitter experienced approximately 98%
uptime in 2007, or about six full days of downtime.
[44] Twitter's downtime was particularly noticeable during events popular with the technology industry, such as the 2008
Macworld Conference & Expo keynote address.
[45][46] 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.
.
In August 2008, Twitter withdrew free
SMS services to users in the United Kingdom
[47] and, for approximately five months, instant messaging support via a
Jabber bot was listed as being "temporarily unavailable".
[48] On October 10, 2008, Twitter's status blog announced that
instant messaging (IM) service was no longer a temporary outage and needed to be revamped. Twitter aims to return its IM service at some point, but says this requires major work to be completed.
[49]
.
When Twitter experiences an outage, users see the "fail whale"
error message created by Australian artist and designer Yiying Lu,
[50] a whimsical illustration of red birds using nets to hoist a whale from the ocean.
[51] The message reads: "Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again."
[51]
.
On 12 June 2009, in what was called a potential "Twitpocalypse", the unique identifier associated with each tweet exceeded
2147483647, the limit for
32-bit signed integers. While Twitter itself was not affected, some third-party clients were, and had to be patched.
[52]
.
In the media
.
In March 2009
Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury strip began to satirize Twitter, with the strip characters ironically highlighting the triviality of "tweets" and
Roland Hedley defending the need to keep up with the constant-update trend or else lose relevance.
[53] SuperNews!, similarly, satirized Twitter as an addiction to "constant self-affirmation" and said Tweets were nothing more than "shouts into the darkness hoping someone is listening".
[54]
.
During a March 2, 2009 episode of
The Daily Show, the host
Jon Stewart 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 show's
Samantha Bee satirized media coverage of the service saying "there's no surprise young people love it—according to reports of young people by middle aged people".
[55]
Another episode of
The Daily Show on February 26, 2009, featured host of
NBC Nightly News,
Brian Williams (a journalist and guest on the show) deriding "tweets" as only having subject matter which refers to the condition of the author in any given instant. Williams implied that he would never use Twitter because nothing he did at any given moment was interesting enough to publish in Twitter format.
[56]
.
Prominent users
British comedian
Stephen Fry is one of the most followed celebrities on Twitter.
.
British comedian
Stephen Fry is well known for having a large number of followers and was reported in
The Times as being the celebrity with the most followers on Twitter in April 2009.
[58] The most followed celebrity today, however, is
Ashton Kutcher, the first Twitter user to reach the one-million-follower mark,
[59] with comedian
Ellen DeGeneres and singer
Britney Spears in second and third place respectively.
.
Usage
2008
.
.
On April 10, 2008, James Buck, a graduate journalism student at
University of California, 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 followers contacted U.C. Berkeley, the U.S. 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.
[63]
.
Research reported in
New Scientist in May 2008
[64] 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
University of Colorado, 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. Organizations that support relief efforts are also using Twitter. The
American Red Cross uses Twitter
[65] to exchange minute-to-minute information about local disasters, including statistics and directions.
[66]
.
Media outlets use Twitter as a source of public sentiment on issues. During the
CBC News television coverage of the Canadian federal election on October 14, 2008, 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, with the majority of the Dion Tweets calling for him to step down in response to the election results.
[67]
.
In October 2008, a draft
U.S. 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."
[68][69]
.
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.
[70] 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".
[70]
.
2009
.
.
On 7 April 2009, thousands of young
anti-communist protesters stormed the presidency and the parliament building in
Chişinău, the capital of
Moldova, accusing the government of electoral fraud. Information about
these events was disseminated widely and on a minute to minute basis through Twitter. To make the information easier to find, the hashtag #pman was used (
Piaţa Marii Adunări Naţionale is the name of the central square in Chişinău).
[76] Twitter was also used to
mobilize for the protests.
[77] It was in the course of these protests that the term
twitter(ed) revolution was first used.
.
.
.
A study from 300,542 users by
Harvard University published in June 2009 discovered that 10% of users created over 90% of Twitter's content. It also showed that many used the service purely to follow others, rather than posting content of their own, so much so that the
median number of tweets per user in a lifetime is one.
[82]
.
In June 2009, following allegations of fraud in the
Iranian presidential election of that year,
protesters used Twitter as an effective rallying tool and as a method of communication with the outside world after the Iranian government blocked several other modes of communication.
[83][84][85][86][87] During the
2009 Iranian election protests, the mainstream media in the United States was criticized on Twitter for not covering the election.
[88].
CNN in particular was criticized, with numerous individuals using the
hashtag #CNNfail.
[88] Twitter was also used to spread information and commit
DDoS attacks.
[89] On June 15, Twitter rescheduled a planned 90-minute maintenance outage, after a number of Twitter users, as well as the
US State Department, asked for a delay (including directly asking company executives), due to concerns about its role as a primary communication medium by the protesters in Iran.
[90][91] After the
post-election protests in Moldova, this was the second wave of protests tagged as a 'twitter revolution',
[84][92][93] though some are sceptical of the term since "most of the organizing happened the old-fashioned way".
[94]
.
Similar services
.
A number of services like Twitter exist, including some which send text messages to multiple people at once. Some services use a similar concept as Twitter but add country-specific services or combine the micro-blogging facilities with other services, such as file sharing. Other services provide similar functionality, but within closed networks for corporations, nonprofits, universities, and other organizations.
[95]
See also
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