Jump to content

Twitter

Edit links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 80.229.169.22 (talk) at 22:14, 14 December 2008 (→Outages: changed to →Controversies). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Twitter, Inc.
Company typePrivate
Industrymobile social network service, micro-blogging
Founded2006
FounderJack Dorsey Edit this on Wikidata
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
,
USA
Key people
Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone
Revenuenone (2008)
Number of employees
25
Websitehttp://twitter.com/

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service, that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, email or through an application such as Tweetie, TwitterFon, Twitterrific, Feedalizr or Facebook. For SMS, four gateway numbers are currently available: short codes for the United States, Canada, and India, as well as a United Kingdom-based number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email. Twitter had by one measure over 3 million accounts[1] and by another, well over 5 million visitors in September 2008 which was a fivefold increase in a month.[2]

History

Twitter founders Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey in 2008 accepting a TechCrunch award for best mobile startup

Founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams, Twitter began as a research and development project inside San Francisco podcasting company Odeo in March 2006.[3]

Odeo was co-founded by Evan Williams, a blogger (evhead.com). In October 2006 the company was bought-out by management, and Williams, Stone, and other Odeo employees started another company named Obvious Corp. to operate Odeo and Twitter, another startup Williams had been testing in the offices for about a year.[4] Twitter had been initially used internally by Odeo's employees, and became a product of Obvious at this time.[5]

The service rapidly gained popularity: In March 2007, it won the 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category.[6] Dorsey, the man behind the concept of Twitter,[7] gave the following playful acceptance speech at SXSW: "We'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!" [8]

Evan Williams in 2007

In April 2007, Obvious spun off the service as a separate entity under the name Twitter, Inc.,[9] with Dorsey as CEO until 2008 when Williams replaced him.[10]

"Summize" was an internet startup using the Twitter XMPP stream to allow users to search twitter conversations in near real-time. On 15 July 2008, Twitter acquired Summize and rolled it into their own site at the subdomain search.twitter.com. At the time of the sale, Summize had 6 employees, of which 5 went on to work at Twitter. CEO Jay Verdy moved on to a new project.[11]

Japanese version

On April 22, 2008, Twitter announced on its blog that it had created a version of Twitter for Japanese users, because they are prominent users of the service, despite the user interface being completely in English.[12] One week after its launch, it was reported that the Japanese version of Twitter had started gaining traction;[13] Japanese is now the second most used language on Twitter.[14] Unlike the US service, the Japanese service is advertising supported.[15]

Prominent users

File:Twitter twitters page.JPG
Twitter's Update Page

Reactions

In 2007, Twitter began experiencing problems related to its growing user base. The service has experienced outages resulting from traffic overloads due to its increased popularity.[33] The Wall Street Journal wrote, "These social-networking services 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. But 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."[34] Satirical references have also been made, such as speculations as to what Shakespeare might tweet, if he used Twitter.

Revenue

Williams raised about USD $22 million in venture capital.[2] Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital and Bezos Expeditions which is led by Jeff Bezos of Amazon.[35] The Industry Standard has pointed to its lack of revenue as limiting its long-term viability.[36] As of 2008, the service sold no advertising and produced no revenue. It is rumored that Twitter turned down an offer from Facebook to acquire the company for $500 million in Facebook company stock.[37]

Privacy

Twitter collects personally identifiable information about its users and shares it with third parties. Twitter considers that information an asset, and reserves the right to sell it if the company changes hands.[38]

Security

The first Twitter security vulnerability was reported on April 7, 2007 by Nitesh Dhanjani. The problem was due to Twitter's using the SMS message originator as the authentication of the user's account. Nitesh used fakemytext.com to spoof a text message, whereupon Twitter posted the message on the victim's page. This vulnerability can only be used if the victim's phone number is known.[39] Within a few weeks of this discovery, Twitter introduced an optional PIN that its users can specify to authenticate SMS-originating messages.

Technology

Twitter is written in Ruby on Rails.[40] The Twitter API itself allows the integration of Twitter with other web services and applications.[41]

In late April 2008, TechCrunch reported that due to downtime related to scaling problems, Twitter would abandon Ruby on Rails as their web framework and start from scratch with PHP or Java.[42] However, this was soon debunked by Evan Williams, in a Tweet that he sent on May 1, 2008.[43]

Controversies

Twitter experienced approximately 98% uptime in 2007, or about 3 full days of downtime.[44][45] Twitter's downtime was particularly noticeable during events popular with the technology industry, such as the 2008 Macworld Conference & Expo keynote address.[46][47] When Twitter crashes, users see the "fail whale" error message. Beluga whales are known as "canaries of the sea" due to their high-pitched twitter,[48] and the fail whale is a whimsical illustration of red birds using nets to hoist a whale from the ocean.[49] The message reads: "Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again."[49] The fail whale has been featured on NPR.[33]

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.

As of August 2008, Twitter withdrew free SMS services to users in most of the world.[50]

As of September 2008, instant messaging support has been "temporarily unavailable" for approximately four months. [51]

Twitter service issues and resolutions can be tracked via their status page at http://status.twitter.com/.

Twitter in media

Twitter has been used as a "social justice tool" to connect groups of people in critical situations. On April 10 2008, James Buck, a graduate journalism student at UC 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 contacted UC Berkeley, the US Embassy in Cairo and a number of press organizations on his behalf. While being detained, Buck was able to send updates about his condition to his "followers". As a result of the message and the efforts of his Twitter friends [dubious – discuss], he was released the next day from the Mahalla jail after the college hired a lawyer for him.[52][53]

Research reported in New Scientist magazine in May 2008 [54] 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 [disambiguation needed] – 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 on a minute by minute basis. Additionally, organizations that support relief efforts are also using Twitter. The American Red Cross uses Twitter (http://twitter.com/RedCross) to exchange minute-to-minute information about local disasters, including statistics and directions.[55][56] In October, 2008 a draft US 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."[57][58] The first trade union Twitter service was launched by the news and campaigning website LabourStart in June 2008[59]

Some media outlets are also starting to use Twitter as a source of public sentiment on issues, and are using the technology in order to deliver real-time or recent-time opinions that are not sent to them directly. A specific example occurred during the CBC News television coverage of the Canadian Federal Election on October 14th, 2008. During the broadcast, 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, the majority of the Dion Tweets calling for him to step down as a consequence of the election results.[citation needed]

In 2008, CNN began setting up Twitter pages for some of its anchors and reading tweets during broadcasts. Rick Sanchez prominently features updates from Twitter followers during his afternoon broadcast.

Similar services

A number of services exist with a similar concept but adding country-specific services (e.g., frazr) or combining the micro-blogging facilities with other services, such as filesharing (e.g., Jaiku).

In May 2007, one source counted as many as 111 such "Twitter look-alikes" internationally.[60] Despite Twitter efforts to localize, Chinese-language Twitter clones have far outdone Twitter's own progress in China.[61]

Yammer, which launched at the TechCrunch50 conference on September 8, 2008, is touted as an enterprise version of Twitter.

Ecosystem

An ecosystem of culture, websites and technology has grown up around Twitter, primarily using Twitter's API. Elements of this ecosystem include:

  • Authoring tools, such as Twhirl and Feedalizr, as well as numerous tools for mobile phones and as browser extensions.
  • Search engines, such as Tweet Scan and Summize (which Twitter purchased on 15 July 2008.)
  • Trends tracking tools, such as Twist
  • "hashtags" trackers, such as Hashtags and Twemes
  • Mashups, such as Twittervision and Cursebird and Twitter Watch
  • Voice to Twitter services, such as Twitterfone
  • Charts for the popularity of users such as Twitterholic
  • Live community bookmarking of news, video streams and images such as 8ZAP
  • Also communities of people (a.k.a. tweeple or tweeps) have formed - called Twitter Underground Brigades or TUBs - who use Twitter to arrange meetups in real life. Examples of these in Australia are: STUB in Sydney, MTUB in Melbourne, PTUB in Perth, CTUB in Canberra, or BTUB in Brisbane

See also

References

  1. ^ "TwitDir". TwitDir. Retrieved 2008-11-07.
  2. ^ a b Womack, Brian (November 12, 2008). "Twitter Shuns Venture-Capital Money as Startup Values Plunge". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2008-11-12.
  3. ^ Glaser, Mark (May 17, 2007). "Twitter Founders Thrive on Micro-Blogging Constraints". Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Retrieved 2008-11-05.
  4. ^ Private Equity Week, 2006-10-30 {{citation}}: Missing or empty |title= (help); Unknown parameter |Year= ignored (|year= suggested) (help)
  5. ^ Williams, Evan (2007-04-16). "Twitter, Inc". Obvious. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  6. ^ Stone, Biz (2007-03-14). "We Won!". Twitter. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  7. ^ Strange, Adario (April 20, 2007). "Flickr Document Reveals Origin Of Twitter". Wired News. CondéNet. Retrieved 2008-11-05.
  8. ^ Note: This should be "fewer" not "less".
  9. ^ Stone, Biz (2007-04-18). "Incorporating Twitter". Twitter. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  10. ^ Miller, Claire Cain (October 20, 2008). "Popularity or Income? Two Sites Fight It Out". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved 2008-11-05.
  11. ^ TC articles on Summize acquisition
  12. ^ Stone, Biz (2008-04-22). "Twitter for Japan". Twitter. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  13. ^ MacManus, Richard (2008-04-28). "Early Stats Show Twitter Taking Off in Japan". ReadWriteWeb. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  14. ^ Niederberger Cabral, Ricardo (2008-09-10). "Language most spoken on Twitter". isnotworking.com. Retrieved 2008-09-11.
  15. ^ Crampton, Thomas (2008-05-23). "Joi Ito: Twitter makes money in Japan". ThomasCrampton.com. Retrieved 2008-05-23.
  16. ^ http://www.azcentral.com/community/chandler/articles/2008/08/27/20080827abrk-twitter0828.html
  17. ^ http://technology.inc.com/networking/articles/200809/twitter.html
  18. ^ Los Angeles Fire Department (2008-05-07). "Twitter / LAFD". Twitter. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  19. ^ Madrigal, Alexis (2008-06-19). "Wired News". Wired News. Retrieved 2008-06-01.
  20. ^ Chang, Kenneth (2008-05-31). "The New York Times". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-06-01.
  21. ^ Ray Foley was inserted on 28 November 2008
  22. ^ Obama, Barack (2008-05-07). "Twitter / BarackObama". Twitter. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  23. ^ Ralph Nader (2008-07-13). "VoteNader.org - Road-trip Across America". Nader for President 2008. Retrieved 2008-07-13.
  24. ^ Whitney, Daisy (November 5, 2008). "CNN, MSNBC Web Sites Most Popular on Election Day". TV Week. Crain Communications. Retrieved 2008-11-06.
  25. ^ Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing (2008-11-08). "Twitter / GTComputing". Twitter. Retrieved 2008-11-08.
  26. ^ University of Texas at San Antonio College of Engineering (2008-05-07). "Twitter / EngineeringUTSA". Twitter. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  27. ^ Twin Cities IMC (2008-09-21). "Organizing Resistance". Twins Cities IMC. Retrieved 2008-09-21.
  28. ^ http://www.number10.gov.uk
  29. ^ Stephanie Busari (2008-11-27). "Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai". CNN.
  30. ^ O'Neal, Shaquille (2008-12-07). "Twitter / THE_REAL_SHAQ". Twitter. Retrieved 2008-12-07.
  31. ^ Fry,Stephen (2008-12-11). "Twitter / stephenfry". Twitter. Retrieved 2008-12-07.
  32. ^ Jeph Jacques (2008-12-13). "Twitter / jephjacques". Twitter. Retrieved 2008-12-07.
  33. ^ a b The Bryant Park Project (July 3, 2008) NPR Twitter, What Are You Doing? Co-Founder Tells All.
  34. ^ Lavallee, Andrew (2007-03-16). "Friends Swap Twitters, and Frustration". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  35. ^ Miller, Claire Cain (October 16, 2008). "Twitter Sidelines One Founder and Promotes Another". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved 2008-11-05.
  36. ^ Snyder, Bill (2008-03-31). "Twitter: Fanatical users help build the brand, but not revenue". The Industry Standard. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  37. ^ Swisher, Kara (November 24, 2008). "When Twitter Met Facebook: The Acquisition Deal That Fail-Whaled". All Things Digital. Retrieved 2008-11-25.
  38. ^ "Twitter Privacy Policy". Twitter. May 14, 2007. Retrieved 2008-11-05.
  39. ^ Dhanjani, Nitesh (2007-04-07). "Twitter and Jott Vulnerable to SMS and Caller ID Spoofing". Nitesh Dhanjani. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  40. ^ Kenzer, Josh (2007-03-29). "5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne". Radical Behavior. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  41. ^ "API Documentation". Google Groups. Retrieved 2008-05-08.
  42. ^ Arrington, Michael (2008-05-01). "Twitter Said To Be Abandoning Ruby on Rails". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  43. ^ Williams, Evan (2008-05-01). "FWIW Twitter has no plans to abandon RoR". Twitter. Retrieved 2008-05-01.
  44. ^ Caverly, Doug (2007-12-20). "Twitter Downtime Revealed, Ridiculed". WebProNews. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  45. ^ Schonfeld, Erick (2007-12-20). "Twitter Downtime On the Upswing". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  46. ^ Dorsey, Jack (2008-01-15). "MacWorld". Twitter. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  47. ^ Kuramoto, Jake (2008-01-15). "MacWorld Brings Twitter to its Knees". Oracle AppsLab. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  48. ^ Harris, Patricia; Lyon, David; (April 8, 2007) Boston Globe Enter close quarters: colonial to nuclear subs. Section: Travel; Page 8M.
  49. ^ a b Whyte, Murray. (June 1, 2008) Toronto Star Tweet, tweet there's been an eartIhquake; How an online social network chirpily called Twitter is becoming anything but trivial. Section: Ideas; Page 1.
  50. ^ "A World without Twitter SMS". Retrieved 2008-08-15.
  51. ^ "Twitter IM down May 23rd-May24th". Retrieved 2008-07-29.
  52. ^ Student 'Twitters' his way out of Egyptian jail - CNN.com
  53. ^ Twitter Saves Man From Egyptian Justice
  54. ^ Emergency 2.0 is coming to a website near you
  55. ^ Facebook 'more effective than emergency services in a disaster' - Telegraph
  56. ^ globeandmail.com: Ingram 2.0 - Facebook: Good in emergencies too
  57. ^ Terrorist 'tweets'? US Army warns of Twitter dangers
  58. ^ al Qaida-Like Mobile Discussions & Potential Creative Uses
  59. ^ Eric Lee: Twitter as a campaigning tool
  60. ^ "The Twitter-clone/twitter-like sites collection". THWS. 2007-05-11. Archived from the original on 2007-08-24. Retrieved 2008-05-07.
  61. ^ Crampton, Thomas (2008-05-23). "Twitter in China (Cloned of Course)". ThomasCrampton.com. Retrieved 2008-05-23.

[1]. Twitter Turns Down Acquisition By Facebook For $500M In Company Stock

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Twitter.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Twitter&oldid=257988478"