Twitter

Twitter is a micro blogging and online social networking service that allows registered users to send and read text-based posts, which are limited to 280 characters. Conceived and brought to the masses by Odeo, a podcasting company, that envisioned a communication platform that would allow individuals to communicate with a small group of users via SMS messages.

The board members of Odeo, on a day back in 2006, during a marathon brainstorming session, named the initial project, “twttr” inspired by the name and spelling of the photo sharing site, Flickr. Work on the project began in earnest in March of 2006 with the American, five-character length short code “40404.” Jack Dorsey, on March 21, 2006, composed the first ‘tweet’ “just setting up my twttr.” Twttr, soon became the now known, “Twitter” which quite aptly described short bursts of information or messages, like the chirps of birds.

Twitter was initially used internally by Odeo employees and by July 2006 was launched publicly. Soon after, a select few of Odeo employees, to include Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone, formed a new corporation, Obvious Corporation, acquired Odeo along with all of its assets from shareholders and investors and by 2007 Twitter became its own company.

Popularity of Twitter grew by leaps and bounds at the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) gathering soon after its launch with the installation of two 60-inch plasma screen displays that streamed their messages exclusively. Conference goers were soon enticed to keep tabs on one another via tweets. This prompted panelist, speakers and attendees to tout it as the newest and most innovative social network application to date.

After its debut at SXSWi, the service took off, with 400K tweets posted each quarter in 2007, which quickly grew to over 100 million in 2008. By January 2009, it was third in popularity among social networking users. Twitter’s traffic, during world and/or critical events spikes greatly. Cases in point would be the death of Michael Jackson, world sporting events, and when public figures ‘mis-tweet’ with rants or unpopular opinions.

In 2011, Twitter rolled out a new design that allows users to customize their profile page a bit more than the original and added value with the Home, Connect and Discover buttons at the top of the page. On February 21, 2012, it was announced that Twitter and Yandex agreed to a partnership. Yandex, a Russian search engine, created more user-value with the partnership due to their integration of Twitter’s real time news feeds into their browser functionality.

On March 21, 2012, Twitter celebrated its sixth birthday by announcing it had reached 140 million users and processes 340 million tweets per day. The number of users is up 40% from their September 2011 number, which was said to have been 100 million at the time.

By default, Tweets are publicly visible, however, users can restrict messages to their followers and can post tweets via most hardware connected to the Internet. This fact alone has increased usage with the smartphone crowd and all traffic posted on Twitter is free of charge unless their carriers or plans don’t include unlimited SMS messages. Smartphone Apps are now also available for Mac and Android users, which makes sending and receiving Tweets possibly easier than making a phone call!

As of April 6, 2011, Twitter engineers transitioned away from their original platform built on the Ruby on Rails search-stack, to a Java server they call Blender. SMS users can communicate with Twitter through five gateway numbers: short codes for the United States, Canada, India, New Zealand, and an Isle of Man-based number for international use. There is also a short code in the United Kingdom which is only accessible to those on the Vodafone, O2 and Orange networks.