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| Company name | Twitter, Inc. |
|---|---|
| Company slogan | What's happening? |
| Company logo | |
| Caption | Twitter logo |
| Company type | Private |
| Foundation | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Founder | Jack Dorsey Evan Williams Biz Stone |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Location city | 795 Folsom St., Suite 600, San Francisco, CA 94107 |
| Location country | |
| Key people | Jack Dorsey (Chairman)Dick Costolo (CEO)Evan Williams (Product Strategy)Biz Stone (Creative Director) |
| Revenue | US $150 million (projected 2010) |
| Url | twitter.com |
| Registration | Required |
| Launch date | July 15, 2006 |
| Website type | Mobile social network service, microblogging |
| Num users | 190 million (accounts, not visitors) |
Twitter is a website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., which offers a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery to their followers. Users may subscribe to other users' tweets—this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers.
All users can send and receive tweets 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. The website is based in San Francisco, California. Twitter also has servers and offices in San Antonio, Texas and Boston, Massachusetts.
Since its creation in March 2006 and its launch in July 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained popularity worldwide and currently has more than 175 million users. It is estimated that Twitter has 190 million users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet."
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The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all of its assets–including Odeo.com and Twitter.com–from the investors and shareholders. Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007.
Reaction at the festival was highly positive. Blogger Scott Beale said that Twitter "absolutely rul[ed]" SXSW. Social software researcher Danah Boyd said Twitter "own[ed]" the festival. Twitter staff received the festival's Web Award prize with the remark "we'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"
The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010. By late November 2010 an average of a dozen updates per day was posted on the astronauts' communal account, @NASA_Astronauts.
In August 2010, the company appointed Adam Bain as President of Revenue from News Corp. Fox Audience Network.
On September 14, 2010, Twitter launched a redesigned site including a new logo.
Twitter's usage spikes during prominent events. For example, a record was set during the 2010 FIFA World Cup when fans wrote 2,940 tweets per second in the 30 second period after Japan scored against Cameroon on 14 June 2010. The record was broken again when 3,085 tweets a second were posted after the Los Angeles Lakers' victory in the 2010 NBA Finals on 17 June 2010., and then again at the close of Japan’s victory over Denmark in the World Cup when users published 3,283 tweets per second. When American singer Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, Twitter servers crashed after users were updating their status to include the words "Michael Jackson" at a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour.
Twitter acquired application developer Atebits on April 11, 2010. Atebits had developed the Apple Design Award-winning Twitter client Tweetie for Mac and iPhone. The application, now called "Twitter" and distributed free of charge, is the official Twitter client for the iPhone.
From September through October 2010, Twitter began rolling out 'New Twitter'. This was an entirely revamped edition of twitter.com. Changes include 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 (YouTube, Flickr etc.), 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' are now accessible via a black bar at the very top of twitter.com. As of November 1, Twitter confirmed that the 'New Twitter experience' had been rolled out to all users. Existing users still have the opportunity to opt out if they dislike the new interface, and go back to using the old-style Twitter. This overhaul did not have any effect on third-party applications such as TweetDeck.
==Features== Technology author Steven Johnson describes the basic mechanics of Twitter as "remarkably simple:"
Twitter has been compared to a web-based Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client.
#. Similarly, the @ sign followed by a username is used for mentioning or replying to other users.
In late 2009, the "Twitter Lists" feature was added, making it possible for users to follow (as well as mention and reply to) lists of authors instead of individual authors.
In January, 2010, MIT alumnus and astronaut Timothy Creamer sent the very first live tweet from space.
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 on the Vodafone, O2 and Orange networks. In India, since Twitter only supports tweets from Bharti Airtel, an alternative platform called smsTweet was set up by a user to work on all networks. A similar platform called GladlyCast exists for mobile phone users in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.
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 bit.ly for automatic shortening of all URLs posted on its website.
According to a study by Sysomos in June 2009, women make up a slightly larger Twitter demographic than men — 53% over 47%. It also stated that 5% of users accounted for 75% of all activity, and that New York has the most Twitter users.
According to Quancast, 27 million people in the US used Twitter as of 09/03/2009. 63% of Twitter users are less than 35 years old, 60% of Twitter users are Caucasian, but a higher than average (compared to other Internet properties) are African American (16%) and Hispanic (11%); 58% of Twitter users have a total household income of at least $60K.
== Finances == headquarters located at 795 Folsom St.]]
Twitter raised over US$57 million from venture capitalist growth funding, although exact numbers are not publicly disclosed. Twitter's first A round of funding was for an undisclosed amount that is rumored to have been between $1 million and $5 million. Its second B round of funding in 2008 was for $22 million and its third C round of funding in 2009 was for $35 million from Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital along with an undisclosed amount from other investors including Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and Insight Venture Partners.
The Industry Standard has remarked that Twitter's long-term viability is limited by a lack of revenue. Twitter board member Todd Chaffee forecast that the company could profit from e-commerce, noting that users may want to buy items directly from Twitter since it already provides product recommendations and promotions.
On April 13, 2010, Twitter announced plans to offer paid advertising for companies that would be able to purchase "promoted tweets" to appear in selective search results on the Twitter website, similar to Google Adwords' advertising model. As of April 13, Twitter announced it had already signed up a number of companies wishing to advertise including Sony Pictures, Red Bull, Best Buy, and Starbucks.
Some of Twitter's revenue and user growth documents were illegally published on TechCrunch by the hacker Croll Hacker. The documents projected 2009 revenues of $400,000 in the third quarter and $4 million in the fourth quarter along with 25 million users by the end of the year. The projections for the end of 2013 were $1.54 billion in revenue, $111 million in net earnings, and 1 billion users. No information about how Twitter plans to achieve those numbers has been published. In response, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone published a blog post suggesting the possibility of legal action against the hacker.
Twitter has been identified as a possible candidate for an initial public offering by 2013.
From the spring of 2007 until 2008 the messages were handled by a Ruby persistent queue server called Starling, but since 2009 implementation has been gradually replaced with software written in Scala. The service's application programming interface (API) allows other web services and applications to integrate with Twitter.
Twitter had approximately 98% uptime in 2007 (or about six full days of downtime). The downtime was particularly noticeable during events popular with the technology industry such as the 2008 Macworld Conference & Expo keynote address.
A security vulnerability was reported on April 7, 2007, by Nitesh Dhanjani and Rujith. Since Twitter used the phone number of the sender of an SMS message as authentication, malicious users could update someone else's status page by using SMS spoofing. The vulnerability could 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 use to authenticate their SMS-originating messages.
On January 5, 2009, 33 high-profile Twitter accounts were compromised after a Twitter administrator's password was guessed by a dictionary attack. Falsified tweets — including sexually explicit and drug-related messages — were sent from these accounts.
Twitter launched the beta version of their "Verified Accounts" service on June 11, 2009, allowing famous or notable people to announce their Twitter account name. The home pages of these accounts display a badge indicating their status.
In May 2010, a bug was discovered by İnci Sözlük users that allowed Twitter users to force others to follow them without the other user's knowledge. For example, comedian Conan O'Brien's account, which had been set to follow only one person was changed to receive nearly 200 malicious subscriptions.
In response to Twitter's security breaches, the Federal Trade Commission brought charges against the service which were settled on June 24, 2010. This was the first time the FTC had taken action against a social network for security lapses. The settlement requires Twitter to take a number of steps to secure users' private information, including maintenance of a "comprehensive information security program" to be independently audited biannually.
On 14 December 2010 the United States Department of Justice issued a subpoena directing Twitter to provide information for accounts registered to or associated with WikiLeaks. Twitter decided to notify its users.
A "MouseOver" exploit occurred on 21 September 2010, when an XSS Worm became active on Twitter. When an account user held the mouse cursor over blacked out parts of a tweet, the worm within the script would automatically open links and re-post itself on the reader's account. The exploit was then re-used to post pop-up ads and links to pornographic sites. The origin is unclear but Pearce H. Delphin (known on Twitter as @zzap) and a Scandinavian developer, Magnus Holm, both claim to have modified the exploit of a user, possibly Masato Kinugawa, who was using it to create coloured Tweets. Kinugawa, a Japanese developer, reported the XSS vulnerability to Twitter on August 14. Later, when he found it was exploitable again, he created the account 'RainbowTwtr' and used it to post coloured messages. The account of Sarah Brown, wife of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was affected. Security firm Sophos reported the virus was spread by people doing it for "fun and games", but noted it could be exploited by cybercriminals. Twitter issued a statement on their status blog at 13:50 UTC that "The exploit is fully patched". Twitter representative Carolyn Penner said no charges would be pressed.
Having previously used the services of third parties TinyURL and bit.ly, Twitter began experimenting with its own URL shortening service for direct messages in March 2010 using the twt.tl domain, The service has also been used in emergencies and political campaigning.
Twitter emphasized their news and information network strategy in November 2009 by changing the question asked users for status updates from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?" Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "Limiting yourself to 140 characters—the maximum for messages on this diabolically addictive social-networking tool—is easy."
On November 22, 2010, Biz Stone expressed for the first time the idea of a Twitter news network, a concept of wire-like news service he has been working on for years.
"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. "For many people, the idea of describing your blow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd," hypothesized writer Clive Thompson. "Why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae? And conversely, how much of their trivia can you absorb? The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme—the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world."
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. "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.
Nielsen Online reports that Twitter has a user retention rate of 40%. Many people stop using the service after a month therefore the site may potentially reach only about 10% of all Internet users. In 2009, Twitter won the "Breakout of the Year" Webby Award.
During a February 2009 discussion on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition, Daniel Schorr stated that Twitter accounts of events lacked rigorous fact-checking and other editorial improvements. In response, Andy Carvin gave Schorr two examples of breaking news stories that played out on Twitter and said users wanted first-hand accounts and sometimes debunked stories.
In an episode of The Daily Show on February 26, 2009, guest Brian Williams described tweets as only referring to the condition of the author. Williams implied that he would never use Twitter because nothing he did was interesting enough to publish in Twitter format. During another episode of The Daily Show on March 2, 2009, host Jon Stewart negatively portrayed members of Congress who chose to "tweet" 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." The influence of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have huge influences on today's youth. Time magazine has acknowledged growing level of influence in their 2010 Time 100 most influential people. To determine the influence of people they used a formula based on famous social networking sites, Twitter and Facebook. The list ranges from Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey to Lady Gaga and Ashton Kutcher. The formula is (Twitter followers) x 2 + (facebook connections) divided by 2.
In March 2009, the comic strip Doonesbury began to satirize Twitter. Many characters highlighted the triviality of tweets although one defended the need to keep up with the constant-update trend. 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".
In August 2010, South Korea tried to block certain content on Twitter due to the North Korean government opening a Twitter account. The North Korean Twitter account created on August 12, @uriminzok, loosely translated to mean "our people" in Korean, acquired over 4,500 followers in less than one week. On August 19, 2010, South Korea's state-run Communications Standards Commission banned the Twitter account for broadcasting "illegal information." According to BBC US and Canada, experts claim that North Korea has invested in "information technology for more than 20 years" with knowledge of how to use social networking sites to their power. This appears to be "nothing new" for North Korea as the reclusive country has always published propaganda in its press, usually against South Korea, calling them "warmongers."
In December 2010, allegations have been made by several IT-news websites and other media reporting that Twitter appeared to engage in censorship activities by impeding WikiLeaks related tweets from becoming trending topics, despite high numbers of tweets concerning WikiLeaks due to activities such as the United States diplomatic cables leak. However, Twitter has denied any involvement with altering Trend results explaining that "WikiLeaks and cablegate have trended worldwide or in specific locations."
* Category:Companies based in San Francisco, California Category:Internet properties established in 2006 Category:Real-time web Category:Social network services Category:Text messaging Category:Web 2.0
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