Twitter
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service itself costs nothing to use.
The 140-character limit on message length was initially set for compatibility with SMS messaging, and has brought to the web the kind of shorthand notation and slang commonly used in SMS messages. The 140 character limit has also spurred the usage of URL shortening services, bit.ly and tr.im, and content hosting services, such as Twitpic and NotePub to accommodate multimedia content and text longer than 140 characters.
Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet" since the use of Twitter's application programming interface for sending and receiving short text messages by other applications often eclipses the direct use of Twitter.
History
Twitter began in a "daylong brainstorming session" that was held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo in an attempt to break out of a creative slump. At that meeting Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group, a concept partly inspired by the SMS group messaging service TXTMob.
The working name was just "Status" for a while. It actually didn’t have a name. We were trying to name it, and mobile was a big aspect of the product early on ... We liked the SMS aspect, and how you could update from anywhere and receive from anywhere.
We wanted to capture that in the name — we wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word "twitch," because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But "twitch" is not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word "twitter," and it was just perfect. The definition was "a short burst of inconsequential information," and "chirps from birds." And that’s exactly what the product was.
Technology
Twitter has been described as akin to a Web-based Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client. The Twitter Web interface uses the Ruby on Rails framework, deployed on a Ruby Enterprise Edition rather than a vanilla Ruby implementation for performance reasons.
From the spring of 2007 until 2008 the actual messages were handled by a Ruby persistent queue server called Starling but since 2009 this has been gradually replaced with software written in Scala. The service's API allows other web services and applications to integrate with Twitter. Searches on the system make use of hashtags, words or phrases prefixed .A search for "beer" would turn up all messages that included. Similarly, the sign followed by a username allows users to send messages directly to each other. A message with would be directed at the user "example" although it can still be read by anyone.
Through SMS, users can communicate with Twitter through five gateway numbers: short codes for the United States, Canada, India, New Zealand, and anIsle of Man-based number for international use. There is also a short code in the
