Just as I have become accustomed to the idea of "blogs," a new form of communication is emerging, the "Twitter."
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, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application such as Twitterrific 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.
As of July 2008, over 2,200,000 accounts were registered
Origins
Twitter began as a research and development project inside San Francisco start-up company Obvious in March 2006. It was initially used internally by the company's employees, and officially launched in October 2006.
The service rapidly gained popularity: In March 2007, it won the 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category. Jack Dorsey, widely acknowledged as the man behind the concept of Twitter, gave the following playful acceptance speech at SXSW: "We'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"
In April 2007, Obvious spun off the service as a separate entity under the name Twitter, Inc., with Jack Dorsey as its CEO.
9 comments:
I had no idea how fast Twitter had blown up. I feel like it's been around for years already. I like your background posts on 7 things you should know and why to care. It already looks developed.
Jeff,
This concept took me by surprise also. As I stated before I am just becoming accustomed to the idea of "blogs" and "vlogs". I find myself playing catch up to all these new forms of online publishing. I do like the fact that twitters are limited to 140 characters making posts short and to the point thus doing away with those posts that tend to be long winded.
~Erma
Erma
Isn't it interesting that Twitter is encouraging communication with fewer characters. This brief comment is to long to be a tweet. Any thoughts on what the long term impact will be if this become a major trend in many forms of communication?
Randi
Erma, Thanks for teaching me one more thing I was clueless about! I'm not at all sure I'm ready to use 140 characters on the run, but it looks like fun.
Funny thing about the blog colors--one of my computers shows a tan background to the text, on the other everything is blue.
I always wondered what a twitter was. Very interesting. I feel so out of the loop with these things. I guess that is where Myspace and other social networking sites got the idea from. Thanks for the post.
The Twitter thing is something new to learn and I imagine myself with the major that I pick for my first two years. I should be a genius in all this but I got disconnected from all new networking world after graduating from Computer Programming in 2004 and accepting the job that I have now as a Job Developer. Your blog is especially worded with extremely good information about the topic. I like it.
The topic of Twitter is a great subject to cover as it’s totally related to new media and even newer than blogging. You provided good background information on what it’s all about. I think the quote of the day feature is a great touch. That keeps things fresh and fun. The only thing I would of done differently is made the graphic file of the graphs larger. I was also confused by what the data is related to.
Hi Erma,
I am so glad I am not the only one who had no idea what Twitter is! Thank you so much for educating me on this program.
I like your layout and the quote of the day. I always find quotes to be encouraging. You manage to incorporate a lot of information in your blog about Twitter but in a friendly and concise way.
I consider myself big on twitting, especially on “Facebook” with the feature it has called the “status bar” where you update as often as you like to notify your friends what you are currently doing. This was probably my first exposure to such communication and way for spreading the news and status of where you are at the present time. Cool topic to feature on.
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