Twitter - history of twitter

Twitter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Twitter, Inc

Type	Private
Founded	San Francisco, California, United States
Founder	Jack Dorsey Evan Williams Biz Stone
Headquarters	795 Folsom St., Suite 600, San Francisco, CA 94107[1],United States
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Jack Dorsey (Chairman) Evan Williams (CEO) Biz Stone (Creative Director)
Revenue	▲ $400,000 Q3 (2009) (projected)[2]
Employees	141[3]
Slogan	What's happening?
Website	www.twitter.com
Alexa rank	▬ 11 (August 2010)[4]
Type of site	mobile social network service,microblogging
Registration	Required
Users	190 million (visitors monthly)[5]
Available in	Multilingual English, Spanish, Japanese, German, French, and Italian
Launched	July 15, 2006[6]
Current status	Active
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Twitter is a website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., which offers a social networking andmicroblogging service which enables its users to send and read other users' messages calledtweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery to their friends list. Users may subscribe to other author tweets—this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers. As of late 2009, users can follow lists of authors instead of just following individual authors.^[7][8]

All users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, compatible external applications (such as, for smartphones), or by Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries.^[9]While the service is free, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees. The website is based in San Bruno, California near San Francisco (where the website was first based). Twitter also has servers and offices in San Antonio, Texas and Boston, Massachusetts.

Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide and currently has more than 100 million users worldwide.^[10] It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet."^[11] The use of Twitter's application programming interface (API) for sending and receiving SMS from other applications often dominates the direct use of Twitter.

Contents [hide] 1 History 1.1 Growth 2 Overview 2.1 Messages 2.2 Tweet contents 2.3 Rankings 2.4 Adding and following content 2.5 Authentication 2.6 Demographics 3 Finances 4 Technology 4.1 Implementation 4.2 Interface 4.3 Outages 4.4 Privacy and security 4.4.1 "MouseOver" exploit 4.5 Open source 5 t.co 5.1 History 6 Reception 6.1 Change of focus 6.2 Criticism 7 See also 8 References 9 External links