Twitter: What are you doing?
Many people are aware that there is now a very rapid growth of social networking. However, since there is a massive growth of social networks that are offering different services and features, a social network should be competent enough to deal and go along with the demand of people. It is known for a fact that people need a very satisfying social network in order to support and meet the needs of the people. Twitter is one of the social networking services. Twitter offers micro-blogging service. This service allows users to send latest news or called ‘tweets’, text-based posts which has a 140 characters long, to the twitter website. Through this site, short message service or SM, instant messaging or a third-party application such as twitterific or Facebook.
The latest news are can be seen on the user’s profile page and automatically delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can limit or restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends only. Delivery to everyone is the default though. Users can receive updates through the twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email of via an application. For short messaging system, numbers are currently available: short codes for the United States, Canada and India, same is true with United Kingdom for international use. Some third parties offer posting and receiving updates through email.
In April 2008, a person by name of James Karl Buck, who was covering a government protests used the Twitter to alert or inform his friends about his current status. Using the word ‘Arrested’, his colleagues became aware and he was able to be freed from jail.
The origin of this site began as a research and development project inside San Francisco start-up company obvious, LLC in March 2006. It was primarily used internally by the company, and was officially launched in October 2006. The service progressively gained popularity and in March 2007, won the 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category. Jack Dersey, is widely acknowledged as the man who made the twitter into possibility and gave the playfyl acceptance speech at SXSW: “We’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we jus did!”