How does twitter work, could you give me more details?

[Vamshi]

Twitter offers a simple way for people to connect. Twitter asks one question… “What are you doing?”

Answers must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or the web.

Twitter’s core technology is a device agnostic message routing system with rudimentary social networking features. They accept messages from SMS, web, mobile web, instant message, or from third party API projects.

Twitter’s engineering team works with an open-source web application framework called Ruby on Rails. The web site and user interface were designed using Omnigraffle and Photoshop. They like to make frequent changes to the interface, and Rails provides them with a skeleton code frameworks so they don’t have to re-do the whole site every time they add or change something like a sign in form or a picture upload feature. I realize that 90% of you do not care about this but now you know

Twitter has a very simple interface for interacting with other users – simply type your message in to a text box, and click to send it out. It then goes into Twitter’s database, is sent out to all that area following you, will appear on your own homepage, your profile and on any cross-platform third party application you might be using (I will get into much more details on this later).