Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking service and micro blogging service that enables its users to send and read text- based messages of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”.
Twitter was aerated in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and by July, the social networking site was launched. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 500 million registered users as of 2012, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.

 Tweets are publicly visible by default, but senders can restrict message delivery to just their followers. Users can tweet via the twitter website, compatible external applications (such as for smart phones), or by Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries.

Users may subscribe to other users’ tweets- this is known as following and subscribers are known as Followers or tweets, a portmanteau of Twitter and peeps. The users can also check the people who are un- subscribing them on twitter via various services.
Twitter allows users to update their profile their mobile phone either by text messaging or by apps released for certain smart phones and tablets.

Users can group posts together by topic or type by use of hash tags – words or phrases prefixed with a “#” sign. Similarly, the “@” sign followed by a user name is used for mentioning or replying to other users.
On April 30, 2009, Twitter adjusted its web interface, adding a search bar and a sidebar of “trending topics” the most common phrases appearing in messages. Biz Stone explains that all messages are instantly indexed and that “with this newly launched feature, twitter has become important – a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now”.

In late 2009, the “Twitter Lists” feature was added, making it possible for users to follow (as well as mention and reply to) ad hoc lists of authors instead of individual authors.
The tweets were ser to a 140 – character limit for compatibility with SMS messaging, introducing the shorthand notation and slang commonly used in SMS message.

There are numerous tools for adding content, monitoring content and conversations including Tally (video sharing, old name is twitvid), Tweet Deck, Salesforce.com, Hoot Suite, and Twitter feed.
Twitter has mobile apps for I phone, I pad, Android, Windows phone, Black Berry, and Nokiya S40. There is also version of the website for mobile devices, SMS and MMS service.

In March 2012, twitter became available in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu, the first right to – left language versions of the site.
About 13,000 volunteers helped with translating the menu options. In August 2012, beta support for Basque, Czech and Greek was added, making the site available in 33 different languages.