Twitter is an American microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as “tweets”. Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, however, unregistered users have the ability to only read tweets that are publicly available. Users interact with Twitter through browser or mobile frontend software, or programmatically via its APIs. Prior to April 2020, services were accessible via SMS. The service is provided by Twitter, Inc., a corporation based in San Francisco, California, and has more than 25 offices around the world.Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but the limit was doubled to 280 for non-CJK languages in November 2017..Audio and video tweets remain limited to 140 seconds for most accounts.
On July 15, 2006, the San Francisco-based podcasting company Odeo officially releases Twttr—later changed to Twitter—its short messaging service (SMS) for groups, to the public.
Born as a side project apart from Odeo’s main podcasting platform, the free application allowed users to share short status updates with groups of friends by sending one text message to a single number (“40404”). Over the next few years, as Twttr became Twitter, the simple “microblogging” service would explode in popularity, becoming one of the world’s leading social networking platforms.
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams first made his name in the Silicon Valley tech world by founding the Web diary-publishing service Blogger, which he sold to Google in 2003 for several million dollars. In 2005, William co-founded Odeo with another entrepreneur, Noah Glass; that fall, however, Odeo’s main service was made obsolete when Apple launched iTunes (including a built-in podcasting platform).
After Williams asked the team of 14 employees to brainstorm their best ideas for the flailing startup, one of the company’s engineers, Jack Dorsey, came up with the concept of a service allowing users to share personal status updates via SMS to groups of people. By March 2006, they had a working prototype, and a name—Twttr—inspired in part by bird sounds, and adopted after some other choices (including FriendStalker) were rejected. Dorsey (@Jack) sent the first-ever tweet (“just setting up my twttr”) on March 21.
At the time Twttr launched to the public in July 2006, it was still a side project of Odeo, while the company’s primary offering, the podcasting platform, was going nowhere. That fall, according to a report in Business Insider, Williams bought out the company’s investors, changed Odeo’s name to Obvious Corporation and fired Glass, whose role in the birth of Twitter (including coming up with its name) wouldn’t become public until years later.
Within six months after the launch, Twttr had become Twitter. Once the service went public, its founders imposed a 140-character limit for messages, based on the maximum length of text messages at the time; this was later expanded to 280 characters.
Use of Twitter exploded at the South by Southwest convention in Austin, Texas, in March 2007, when more than 60,000 tweets were sent per day, and grew rapidly from there. By 2013, the New York Times reported that the company had more than 2,000 employees and more than 200 million active users. That November, when the company went public, it was valued at just over $31 billion.
Though Twitter’s user base is much smaller than that of Facebook (which has more than 2 billion monthly active users as of 2019), it has increasingly become a source of breaking news and information, especially for younger users. The company’s prominence rose with the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, who was outspoken on Twitter throughout his campaign and often tweeted policy decisions or other announcements during his administration. (The former president was banned from the service in 2021 for using it to incite violence.) Like other social media companies, Twitter and Dorsey, its CEO, have faced pressure to police the content on the site more closely to prevent bullying, harassment and hate speech, as well as better protect its users’ privacy.
A sketch, c. 2006, by Jack Dorsey, envisioning an SMS-based social network.
Twitter’s origins lie in a “daylong brainstorming session” held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, then an undergraduate student at New York University, introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The original project code name for the service was twttr, the disemvowelled version of the word twitter, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The decision was also partly due to the fact that the domain twitter.com was already in use, and it was six months after the launch of twttr that the crew purchased the domain and changed the name of the service to Twitter. The developers initially considered “10958” as a short code, but later changed it to “40404” for “ease of use and memorability”. Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 12:50 p.m. PST (UTC−08:00): “just setting up my twttr”. Dorsey has explained the origin of the “Twitter” title:
…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.
The first Twitter prototype, developed by Dorsey and contractor Florian Weber, was used as an internal service for Odeo employees. The full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo, together with its assets—including Odeo.com and Twitter.com—from the investors and shareholders.Williams fired Glass, who was silent about his part in Twitter’s startup until 2011. Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007.Williams provided insight into the ambiguity that defined this early period in a 2013 interview:
With Twitter, it wasn’t clear what it was. They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define, because it didn’t replace anything. There was this path of discovery with something like that, where over time you figure out what it is. Twitter actually changed from what we thought it was in the beginning, which we described as status updates and a social utility. It is that, in part, but the insight we eventually came to was Twitter was really more of an information network than it is a social network.
The tipping point for Twitter’s popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000.”The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages,” remarked Newsweek‘s Steven Levy. “Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it. Reaction at the conference was highly positive. Blogger Scott Beale said that Twitter was “absolutely ruling” SXSWi. Social software researcher Danah Boyd said Twitter was “owning” the conferenceTwitter staff received the festival’s Web Award prize with the remark “we’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!”
The company experienced rapid initial growth. It had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007. This grew to 100 million tweets posted per quarter in 2008. In February 2010, Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day. In 2009, Twitter won the “Breakout of the Year” Webby Award. On November 29, 2009, Twitter was named the Word of the Year by the Global Language Monitor, declaring it “a new form of social interaction” By March 2010, the company recorded over 70,000 registered applications. As of June 2010, about 65 million tweets were posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each second, according to Twitter. As of March 2011, that was about 140 million tweets posted daily. As noted on Compete.com, Twitter moved up to the third-highest-ranking social networking site in January 2009 from its previous rank of twenty-second.
Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, in 2009
Twitter’s usage spikes during prominent events. For example, a record was set during the 2010 FIFA World Cup when fans wrote 2,940 tweets per second in the thirty-second period after Japan scored against Cameroon on June 14, 2010. The record was broken again when 3,085 tweets per second were posted after the Los Angeles Lakers’ victory in the 2010 NBA Finals on June 17, 2010, and then again at the close of Japan’s victory over Denmark in the World Cup when users published 3,283 tweets per second. The record was set again during the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup Final between Japan and the United States, when 7,196 tweets per second were published. When American singer Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, Twitter servers crashed after users were updating their status to include the words “Michael Jackson” at a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour. The current record as of August 3, 2013, was set in Japan, with 143,199 tweets per second during a television screening of the movie Castle in the Sky (beating the previous record of 33,388, also set by Japan for the television screening of the same movie).
The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010. By late November 2010, an average of a dozen updates per day were posted on the astronauts’ communal account, @NASA_Astronauts. NASA has also hosted over 25 “tweetups”, events that provide guests with VIP access to NASA facilities and speakers with the goal of leveraging participants’ social networks to further the outreach goals of NASA. In August 2010, the company appointed Adam Bain from News Corp.’s Fox Audience Network as president of revenue.[relevant? – discuss]
Twitter acquired application developer Atebits on April 11, 2010. Atebits had developed the Apple Design Award-winning Twitter client Tweetie for the Mac and iPhone. The application, now called “Twitter” and distributed free of charge, is the official Twitter client for the iPhone, iPad and Mac.
From September through October 2010, the company began rolling out “New Twitter”, an entirely revamped edition of twitter.com. Changes included the ability to see pictures and videos without leaving Twitter itself by clicking on individual tweets which contain links to images and clips from a variety of supported websites including YouTube and Flickr, and a complete overhaul of the interface, which shifted links such as ‘@mentions’ and ‘Retweets’ above the Twitter stream, while ‘Messages’ and ‘Log Out’ became accessible via a black bar at the very top of twitter.com. As of November 1, 2010, the company confirmed that the “New Twitter experience” had been rolled out to all users. In 2019, Twitter was announced to be the 10th most downloaded mobile app of the decade, from 2010 to 2019.
On April 5, 2011, Twitter tested a new homepage and phased out the “Old Twitter”. However, a glitch came about after the page was launched, so the previous “retro” homepage was still in use until the issues were resolved; the new homepage was reintroduced on April 20. On December 8, 2011, Twitter overhauled its website once more to feature the “Fly” design, which the service says is easier for new users to follow and promotes advertising. In addition to the Home tab, the Connect and Discover tabs were introduced along with a redesigned profile and timeline of Tweets. The site’s layout has been compared to that of Facebook. On February 21, 2012, it was announced that Twitter and Yandex agreed to a partnership. Yandex, a Russian search engine, finds value within the partnership due to Twitter’s real time news feeds. Twitter’s director of business development explained that it is important to have Twitter content where Twitter users go. On March 21, 2012, Twitter celebrated its sixth birthday while also announcing that it had 140 million users and 340 million tweets per day. The number of users was up 40% from their September 2011 number, which was said to have been at 100 million at the time.
On June 5, 2012, a modified logo was unveiled through the company blog, removing the text to showcase the slightly redesigned bird as the sole symbol of Twitter. On December 18, 2012, Twitter announced it had surpassed 200 million monthly active users. Twitter hit 100 million monthly active users in September 2011.
On January 28, 2013, Twitter acquired Crashlytics in order to build out its mobile developer products. On April 18, 2013, Twitter launched a music app called Twitter Music for the iPhone On August 28, 2013, Twitter acquired Trendrr,followed by the acquisition of MoPub on September 9, 2013 As of September 2013, the company’s data showed that 200 million users sent over 400 million tweets daily, with nearly 60% of tweets sent from mobile devices.
During Super Bowl XLVII on February 3, 2013, the power went out in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome Mondelez International vice president Lisa Mann was asked to tweet, “You can still dunk in the dark”, referring to Oreo cookies. She approved, and as she told Ad Age in 2020, “literally the world changed when I woke up the next morning.” This became a milestone in the development of commenting daily on culture
In April 2014, Twitter underwent a redesign that made the site resemble Facebook somewhat, with profile picture and biography in a column left to the timeline, and a full-width header image with parallax scrolling effect.[a] That layout was used as main for the desktop front end until July 2019, undergoing changes over time such as removal of shortcut buttons to jump to the previous or next tweet in early 2017, and rounded profile pictures since June 2017.
In April 2015, the Twitter.com desktop homepage changed. Later in the year it became apparent that growth had slowed, according to Fortune Business Insider Marketing Land and other news websites including Quartz (in 2016).
Since May 2018, tweet replies deemed by an artificial intelligence to be detractive from conversation are initially hidden, and only loaded through actuating a Show more replies button at the bottom.
In 2019, Twitter released another redesign of its user interface and ended support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 connections.
Twitter experienced considerable growth in 2020, possibly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The platform also was increasingly used for misinformation related to the pandemic. Twitter announced in March 2020 that it would start marking tweets which may contain misleading information, in some cases it will provide links to pages of fact-checking information.
A major hack of Twitter on July 15, 2020, affected 130 high-profile accounts, both verified and unverified ones such as Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk; the hack allowed bitcoin scammers to send tweets via the compromised accounts that asked the followers to send bitcoin to a given public address, with the promise to double their money. Within a few hours, Twitter disabled tweeting and reset passwords from all verified accounts. Analysis of the event revealed that the scammers had used social engineering to obtain credentials from Twitter employees to access an administration tool used by Twitter to view and change these accounts’ personal details as to gain access as part of a “smash and grab” attempt to make money quickly, with an estimated US$120,000 in bitcoin deposited in various accounts before Twitter intervened. Several law enforcement entities including the FBI launched investigations into the attack to determine the perpetrators over concerns of broader implications of such a hack in the future.
On June 1, 2020, Twitter deactivated the legacy desktop front end of their web site that had originally been introduced in 2014, leaving the progressive web app version which was originally introduced in April 2017 as “Twitter Lite” for mobile phones and used by default since July 2019 as the only option.
In November 2020, Twitter announced that it would develop a social audio feature on its platform. Later, In December 2020, Twitter began beta testing its social audio feature known as Spaces with iOS users on their platform.
“M2 Mobile Web”, the original mobile web front end of Twitter, later served as fallback legacy version to clients without JavaScript support and incompatible browsers such as game consoles with limited web browsing capability. It was shut down in December 2020
Further information: Social media use by Donald Trump § Twitter
The two tweets on May 26, 2020, from President Trump that Twitter had marked “potentially misleading” (inserting the blue warning icon and “Get the facts…” language) that led to the executive order
After US president Donald Trump had used his Twitter account on May 26, 2020, to issue a statement related to possible fraud associated with mail-in voting ahead of the upcoming 2020 primary elections. Twitter moderators marked Trump’s tweets as “potentially misleading” and added links to a dedicated page with additional articles from other news sources on mail-in voting, the first time they had marked Trump’s tweets as such. Trump, who had previously alleged Twitter, and other technology companies, have an anti-conservative bias, announced his intention to enact regulations to take action against Twitter. Two days later, on May 28, 2020, Trump signed “Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship” aimed to impact the protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which Twitter and other social media sites have to avoid liability for dealing with moderation of user content on their platforms.
Twitter was among the platforms associated with the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. According to the Associated Press, “federal law enforcement authorities said that there was activity on Twitter, but that they weren’t expecting the level of violence they ultimately saw last Wednesday.” This led to Trump being suspended from Twitter for glorifying violence, among other reasons such as false allegations of election fraud. According to researcher Shannon McGregor, “Twitter’s permanent suspension of Trump’s Twitter account is long overdue.” However, among conservatives and some European leaders, a degree of controversy ensued over the power held by a private company over speech. Nathan Akehurst of Jacobin Magazine suggested that “Twitter profited from Donald Trump’s racist outbursts for years, only to delete his account a few days before his departure”.
In March 2021, Twitter started beta testing Spaces for Android users. On March 5, it was announced that Twitter was working on a feature that would offer users a short window of time to rethink a tweet after they hit send. Twitter confirmed to CNN that it is testing an undo option that could potentially let users correct or even to retract a tweet before it is posted on the site. On May 3, 2021, Twitter Spaces was released globally.
In 2021, Twitter announced an open source initiative that could be used by any social media platform and would make content moderation more transparent with a more robust appeals process. Called Bluesky, the use of such an open protocol would relieve companies of the sole responsibility for being centralized curators of content. The Twitter research team that began work on this effort was set up in late 2019.
On June 5, the Nigerian government issued an indefinite ban on Twitter usage in the country after the platform removed tweets made by the Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari. The company claimed the tweets violated its policies against “abusive behavior”. Twitter called the ban “deeply concerning”. Several human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and the local Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), spoke out against the ban as well. The Nigerian government stated that the ban was not based solely on the removal of the tweets and was a result of “a litany of problems with the social media platform in Nigeria, where misinformation and fake news spread through it have had real world violent consequences”
In June 2021, Twitter announced the beta rollout of its Super Follows feature. A group of users will be allowed to charge followers monthly for access to extra content, not available in their regular feed. The company also launched the Ticketed Spaces program in beta, a premium version of its audio room feature Spaces, which makes access to certain audio rooms paid.
Twitter rolled out changes in the interface on August 11, 2021. Among adjustments in color uses, the major change was converting to their new Chirp font, designed to allow left-alignment of most Western languages as to make browsing of tweets easier to follow.
An October 21, 2021, report based on a “long-running, massive-scale randomized experiment” that analyzed “millions of tweets sent between 1 April and 15 August 2020”, found that Twitter’s machine learning algorithm amplified right-leaning politics on personalized user Home timelines. The report compared seven countries with active Twitter users where data was available—Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, and Spain—and examined Tweets “from major political groups and politicians”. Researchers used the 2019 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHESDATA) to position parties on political ideology within each country. The “machine learning algorithms”—introduced by Twitter in 2016—personalized 99% of users’ feeds by displaying Tweets—even older Tweets and Retweets from accounts the user had not directly followed—but that the algorithm had “deemed relevant” to the users’ past preferences. Twitter randomly chose 1% of users whose Home timelines displayed content in reverse-chronological order from users they directly followed.
In May 2022, Twitter agreed to pay $150 million to settle a lawsuit started by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. The lawsuit concerned Twitter’s use of email addresses and phone numbers of Twitter users to target advertisements at them. The company also agreed to third-party audits of its data privacy program.
Further information: Proposed acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk
Business magnate Elon Musk revealed that he had bought 9.1% of Twitter for $2.64 billion on April 4, 2022. In response, Twitter’s stock rose by as much as 27% and Twitter shares experienced the largest intraday surge since Twitter’s IPO in 2013. Musk was offered a seat on Twitter’s board of directors as part of a deal that prohibited him from acquiring more than 14.9% of the company, but Musk decided not to join the board before his appointment became effective on April 9.
Musk then made an unsolicited offer on April 14 to acquire Twitter for $43 billion and take the company private, saying that he believed in the importance of free speech for democracy around the world. In a TED interview, Musk showed little interest in fighting internet censorship around the world, saying that “Twitter should match the laws of the country”. Instead, Musk’s concern about free speech has been directed almost entirely at Twitter’s moderation policies. Twitter’s board introduced a “poison pill” strategy on April 15, which would allow shareholders to buy additional stock should a hostile takeover occur as a means to block Musk’s takeover. On April 20, Musk secured $46.5 billion as a tender offer to buy Twitter On April 25, it was reported that Twitter was prepared to accept Musk’s offer with the board publicly accepting the offer later that day.
Musk has stated that his first plan is to open-source the algorithm that ranks tweets in the content feed, in order to increase transparency. He has stated intention to remove the spam bots, and to authenticate all real humans.
According to the social network, about 140 million people have been actively using Twitter since its release. But Twitter is not just for personal use. Businesses can use it to build brand awareness and marketing. Twitter is free to join. This is a network where users can follow friends, athletes, actors and anyone else who has a Twitter account, whether they really know the person or not. But just like Facebook, there are significant drawbacks to using Twitter.3.1.Buried Tweets
According to Twitter, since April 2012, 340 million new tweets appear daily on the social networking site. Despite the large number of new tweets that arrive daily and the number of users that account holders follow, individual user tweets have the potential to be buried quickly, and many tweets may be viewed by the intended audience. Do not do. It is also difficult to measure the number of times tweets are read. Twitter has limited the number of accounts that users follow to 2,000.
Unlike Facebook, Twitter has personality restrictions for its posts. Users should type tweets briefly, as they have 140 characters to work with. In addition, while Twitter enables sending images (Twitpic), it is limited to sending video. For example, while users can tweet YouTube video links, they can not actually tweet videos from web services or upload videos from any desktop software.
Twitter says it has 140 million active users joining more and more every day – but a small percentage of them are spammers. While Twitter has improved its security measures to detect bots and spam before it became a problem, spam still exists on Twitter. Twitter allows users to flag anything they know to be spam. Twitter spam usually tags your username with a link to a website. It’s easy to remove, but still annoying.
Twitter offers a direct messaging feature that allows users to chat privately, similar to sending an email or message on Facebook. Unlike messaging, however, Twitter allows users to send direct messages to only one user at a time. This makes its messaging system inefficient compared to other social networks and media.
Maintaining a Twitter presence requires a commitment of time. It is also important that account management staff have the right skills and training.
Customers can complain publicly about a product or service. Negative feedback can have a detrimental effect on your business. However, handling complaints can have a positive effect on your reputation.
Unless you tweet at the right time, your tweets are easily lost when your followers are online.
Beware of spam accounts on Twitter. In particular, do not click on suspicious links from users you do not know.
The 280-character limit is limited to your Twitter characters. It may take time to learn how to com
There are several benefits to using Twitter for a business:
Twitter has a large user base that can include your potential customers. Using hashtags can help you reach an audience that is interested in a particular topic or place.
This platform allows direct two-way communication with your customers. Because it’s a public interaction, if you do it well, it will show your business in a positive light.
Being on Twitter can help you connect with your brand ethics and personality. This should help your business reach its target audience.
Twitter can be a useful source for collecting feedback from
customers.
Setting up a Twitter account is free. While paid advertising is available, many businesses are seeing the benefits of organic mailing and interactions.
Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. By 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. The company went public in November 2013. By the start of 2019, Twitter had more than 330 million monthly active users.
On April 25, 2022, the Twitter board of directors agreed to a $44 billion buyout by Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, potentially making it one of the biggest deals to turn a company private.
Twitter, Inc. is a global platform for public self-expression and conversation in real time. It provides a network that connects users to people, information, ideas, opinions, and news. The company’s services include live commentary, live connections and live conversations. Its application provides social networking services and micro-blogging services through mobile devices and the Internet. The company can also be used as a marketing tool for businesses. It’s products and services include Twitter, Periscope, Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts and Promoted Trends. Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, Christopher Isaac Stone, Noah E. Glass, Jeremy LaTrasse, and Evan Williams on March 21, 2006 and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.
Source : history _ smallbusiness _ perkupapp _ nibusinessinfo.co
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