Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and micro blogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140characters, informally known as "tweets". Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 200 million users as of 2011, generating over 200 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.

 

Founder Profile

Name	Jack Dorsey
Born	19, 1976, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S
Education	University of Science and Technology, New York University
Occupation	Software Designer, Computer programmer, Entrepreneur.
Products	Twitter  Inc and Square Inc

Jack Dorsey is an American software architect and businessperson best known as the creator of Twitter. He took Twitter through an order of magnitude of growth and two major rounds of financing, whilst safely navigating the business through some difficult times. He is also the co-founder and CEO of the new credit card payment device Square. MIT’s Technology Review named him in the TR35, an outstanding innovator under the age of 35.

Originally from St. Louis, Jack Dorsey’s early interest in real-time messaging lead him to Manhattan where he wrote dispatch software for taxis, couriers and emergency 911 centers. Throughout his work on dispatch, medical, and ticketing systems, he kept discovering the concept of ’status’ updates, which helped full the ideas behind Twitter, a global utility connecting people in real-time through short updates from wherever they are.

 

History of Twitter

 After a brief stint at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, Dorsey transferred to New York University. In the tradition of computer science entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, he dropped out of college before receiving his degree. Instead, Dorsey moved to Oakland, California, and in 2000 started a company offering his dispatch software through the Web. Shortly after starting his company, Dorsey came up with the idea for a site that would combine the broad reach of dispatch software with the ease of instant messaging, and approached a now-defunct Silicon Valley company called Odeo to pitch the concept. "He came to us with this idea: 'What if you could share your status with all your friends really easily, so they know what you're doing?'" said Biz Stone, a former Odeo executive. Dorsey, Stone and Odeo co-founder Evan Williams started a new company, called Obvious, which later evolved into Twitter. Within two weeks, Dorsey had built a simple site where users could instantly post short messages of 140 characters or less, known in Twitter parlance as "tweets."

On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey posted the world's first tweet: "just setting up my twttr." Dorsey was named the company's chief executive officer. Co-founder Evan Williams replaced Dorsey as Twitter's CEO in October 2008, with Dorsey staying on as company chairman. On March 28, 2011, Dorsey returned to twitter as Executive Chairman.

  

Twitter 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.com, Twitter moved up to the third-highest-ranking social networking site in January 2009 from its previous rank of twenty-second.

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. 

 

Features and Concepts

1. Tweet: The word “tweet” is a Twitter term used as both a noun and a verb. As a verb, it used to talk about a user posting something on Twitter. When used as a noun, it refers to an individual Twitter post.
2. Retweet: The “retweet” (often shortened to “RT”) was not originally designed by the Twitter team. Twitter users invented it so they can re-post something really interesting from another Twitter user.
3. Reply and Mention: A “reply” on Twitter is a direct response to a post from another user. “mention” is where user identify someone user mention by using his or her @username.
4. Direct Message: Direct Message is services that give privacy to user to send their tweet to a specific user without everyone else notice or see it.
5. #hashtag: Hashtags are essentially keywords. For example, #techrepublic is a hashtag. When people post links to TechRepublic articles, they often identify them by adding the #techrepublic hashtag at the end of the tweet. Doing a Twitter search on a hashtag allows user to see all of the Twitter conservations that are happening around a specific topic. It can also be a good way to find people who regularly talk about a specific topic and then follow them.
6. Posting Link: Some of the most popular things to post on Twitter are links to articles, blog posts, video clips, etc. Many of the most valuable people to follow are the ones who post the best links, and that means not just the big stories that everyone is tweeting but also the really good stories that are under the radar.
7. Posting Photos and Videos: Another interesting things to post on Twitter are photos and videos taken from user’s smartphone. This can be especially useful when user is at trade conferences and industry events and user wants to report on items of interest or user can share their daily photos and videos to their friends via twitter by posting it.