Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging 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, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide. It is sometimes described as "SMS of the Internet" The use of Twitter's application programming interface for sending and receiving text messages by other applications often eclipses direct use of Twitter.
Twitter began in a "daylong brainstorming session" that was held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo in an attempt to break a creative slump. During that meeting, Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using a SMS service to communicate with a small group, a concept partially inspired by the SMS group messaging service TXTMob.
The original product name or codename for the service was twttr, inspired by Flickr and the fact that American SMS short codes are five characters. The developers initially experimented with "10958″ as a short code, though 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 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): "just setting up my twttr".
The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees, later launching publicly into a full-scale version in July 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all of its assets—including Odeo.com and Twitter.com from the investors and other shareholders. Twitter later spun off into its own company in April 2007.The tipping point for Twitter's popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. During the event usage went 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. Soon everyone was buzzing and posting about this new thing that was sort of instant messaging and sort of blogging and maybe even a bit of sending a stream of telegrams." Reaction at the festival was overwhelmingly positive. Laughing Squid blogger Scott Beale said Twitter "absolutely rul[ed]" SXSW. Social software researcher Danah Boyd said Twitter "own[ed]" the festival. Twitter staff accepted their prize for the festival's Web Award with the remark "we'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"
Outages
When Twitter experiences an outage, users see the "fail whale" error message image
created by Yiying Lu, an illustration of red birds using nets to hoist a whale from the ocean along with the text "Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again."Twitter experienced approximately 98 percent uptime in 2007, or about six full days of downtime. Twitter's downtime was particularly noticeable during events popular with the technology industry such as the 2008 Macworld Conference & Expo keynote address. During May 2008 Twitter's new engineering team made architectural changes to deal with the scale of growth. Stability issues resulted in down time or temporary feature removal.
In August 2008, Twitter withdrew free SMS services to users in the United Kingdom and for approximately five months instant messaging support via a XMPP bot was listed as being "temporarily unavailable". On October 10, 2008, Twitter's status blog announced that instant messaging (IM) service was no longer a temporary outage and needed to be revamped. Twitter aims to return its IM service at some point but says this requires some major work.
On June 12, 2009, in what was called a potential "Twitpocalypse", the unique identifier associated with each tweet exceeded the limit for 32-bit signed integers. While Twitter itself was not affected, some third-party clients found that they could no longer access recent tweets. Patches were quickly released, though some iPhone applications had to wait for approval from the App Store. On September 22, the identifier exceeded the limit for 32-bit unsigned integers, again breaking some third-party clients.
On August 6, 2009, Twitter and Facebook suffered from a denial-of-service attack, causing the Twitter website to be offline for several hours. It was later confirmed that the attacks were directed at one pro-Georgian user around the anniversary of the 2008 South Ossetia War, rather than the sites themselves. A hacking attack was aimed at Twitter on 17 December 2009, replacing for nearly an hour the home website's welcome screen with an image of a green flag and the caption "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army." It was unknown whether there was indeed any link between the hackers and Iran.
Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/51/Twitter_logo.svg/300px-Twitter_logo.svg.png
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/db/Twitter.PNG
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b6/Twitter-030709.png
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/76/Content_of_Tweets_Graphed.png
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/de/Failwhale.png
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