Features of Twitter

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 smartphones, 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.

In June 2008, Twitter launched a verification program which 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.

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.

^{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.}

Tweet Contents

San Antonio based market-research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets and separated them into six categories:

Content of Tweets according to Pear Analytics 

  News - 4%

  Spam - 4%

  Self-promotion - 6%

  Pointless babble - 40%

  Conversational - 38%

  Pass-along value - 9%


Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

Introduction to Tweeting

Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as tweets. It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service 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 has been described as the SMS of the Internet. Jack Dorsey was born on November 19, 1976. He is an American software architect and businessman widely known as the creator of Twitter and as the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company. In 2008, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

JACK DORSEY

EVAN WILLIAMS

BIZ STONE

When he first saw implementations of instant messaging, Dorsey had wondered if the software's user status output could be shared among friends easily. He approached Odeo, who at the time happened to be interested in text messaging. Dorsey and Biz Stone decided that SMS text suited the status message idea, and built a prototype of Twitter in about two weeks. The idea attracted many users at Odeo and investment from Evan Williams who had left Google after selling them Pyra Labs and Blogger. Dorsey, Stone, and Williams co-founded Obvious which then spun off Twitter, Inc. As chief executive officer, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of funding by the venture capitalists who backed the company. On October 16 2008, Williams took over the role of CEO and Dorsey became chairman of the board. On March 28 2011, Dorsey returned to Twitter as Executive Chairman. As the service grew in popularity, Dorsey chose improving uptime as top priority, even over creating revenue which Twitter was not designed to earn. Dorsey described the commercial use of Twitter and its API as two things that could lead to paid features. His three guiding principles which are shared by the whole company and through its culture, are simplicity, constraint and craftsmanship.

EVAN WILLIAMS - BIZ STONE - JACK DORSEY

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dorsey