what is twitter please tell and earn 10 pts? .?

[A.K.]

ohlg

[...:::Mariu5:::...]

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read other user messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author'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 following individual authors. 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.While the service is free, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

[Alankrit]

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read other user messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author'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 following individual authors.[4][5] 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.[6] While the service is free, 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 and currently has more than 100 million users worldwide[7]. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet."[8] The use of Twitter's application programming interface (API) for sending and receiving SMS from other applications often dominates the direct use of Twitter.

Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" that was held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. During the meeting, Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group, a concept partially inspired by the SMS group messaging service TXTMob.[9]

[Eggybread]

It's like facebook status updates (no photos) but you can read the news there too

[Achal]

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read other user messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author'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 following individual authors.All users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, compatible external applicationsor by Short Message Serviceavailable in certain countries.While the service is free, 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 and currently has more than 100 million users worldwide. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet. The use of Twitter's application programming interface (API) for sending and receiving SMS from other applications often dominates the direct use of Twitter.Users can group posts together by topic or type by use of hashtags — words or phrases prefixed with a # Similarly, the letter d followed by a username allows users to send messages privately. Finally, the @ sign followed by a username is used for mentioning or replying to other usersIn late 2009, the "Twitter Lists" feature was added, making it possible for users to follow (as well as mention and reply to) lists of authors instead of individual authors.Through SMS, users can communicate with Twitter through five gateway numbers: short codes for the United States, Canada, India, New Zealand, and an Isle of Man-based number for international use. There is also a short code in the United Kingdom which is only accessible to those on the Vodafone, O2 and Orange[networks. In India, since Twitter only supports tweets from Bharti Airtel,an alternative platform called smsTweet was set up by a user to work on all networks.[29] A similar platform called GladlyCastexists for mobile phone users in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.Twitter is ranked as one of the 50 most visited websites worldwide by Alexa's web traffic analysis.Daily user estimates vary because the company does not release the number of active accounts. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranked Twitter as the third most used social network based on their count of 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits.n March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing website in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had a monthly growth of 1,382 percent, followed by Zimbio with 240 percent increase, and Facebook with 228 percent increaseHowever, only 40 percent of Twitter's users are retained.Twitter raised over US$57 million from venture capitalist growth funding, although exact numbers are not publicly disclosed. Twitter's first A round of funding was for an undisclosed amount that is rumored to have been between $1 million and $5 millionIts second B round of funding in 2008 was for $22 millionand its third C round of funding in 2009 was for $35 million from Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital along with an undisclosed amount from other investors including Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and Insight Venture PartnersTwitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions.The Industry Standard has remarked that Twitter's long-term viability is limited by a lack of revenue.Twitter board member Todd Chaffee forecast that the company could profit from e-commerce noting that users may want to buy items directly from Twitter since it already provides product recommendations and promotionsTwitter collects personally identifiable information about its users and shares it with third parties. The service reserves the right to sell this information as an asset if the company changes handsWhile Twitter displays no advertising, advertisers can target users based on their history of tweets and may quote tweets in adsA security vulnerability was reported on April 7, 2007, by Nitesh Dhanjani and Rujith. Since Twitter used the phone number of the sender of an SMS message as authentication, malicious users could update someone else's status page by using SMS spoofing.The vulnerability could be used if the spoofer knew the phone number registered to their victim's account. Within a few weeks of this discovery Twitter introduced an optional personal identification number (PIN) that its users could use to authenticate their SMS-originating messages.Twitter released several open source projects developed while overcoming technical challenges of their service.Notable projects are the Gizzard Scala framework for creating distributed datastores and the distributed graph database FlockDB.

[Cindy]

It's everything the other posters said. It can be useful for businesses to update potential customers on new products. Otherwise, it's basically for people with no life. I'm sorry, but I don't need to know that you just ate breakfast and now you're going to the bathroom.

Incidentally, some dumb people make it easy to tell others where they live by posting personal information. If criminals know what city you're in, they can find your address. One lady twittered that she was going to be out of the house at some function and what time she was leaving. When she got back, her house had been robbed.

[chanchal1987]

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read other user messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author'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 following individual authors. 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. While the service is free, 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 and currently has more than 100 million users worldwide. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet." The use of Twitter's application programming interface (API) for sending and receiving SMS from other applications often dominates the direct use of Twitter.

Learn more from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Twitter