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TWITTER: Started in 2006 by co-founders Biz Stone, Noah Glass, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams in San Francisco, and popularized by Oprah, this is a free social networking and micro-blogging web site where you can broadcast very short messages (See SMS) called “Tweets” (140 characters max; true SMS has 160 characters) to anyone who’s signed up to receive them, kind of like a cross between a blog and a chat room.  [See BLOGGING.]    The name Twitter came, the co-founders say, from a possible list of names that they compiled.  They liked the idea of Twitter because birds twitter, an insignificant little noise, but still part of a larger community. On March 21, 2006 Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet:  “Just setting up my twttr,” he wrote.

Twitter was born in 2006 as a side project.  At the time, it was an appendage of a podcasting service named Odeo, another company that Evan Williams co-founded that had millions of dollars from investors.  Even the founders, though, were having a hard time getting excited about Odeo, and Williams told everyone who worked there to hatch new ideas.  While sitting on a children's slide at a park eating Mexican food one day, an engineer named Jack Dorsey suggested to colleagues a simple way to send status updates by using text messages.  Dorsey and Biz Stone built a prototype in only two weeks.

Twitter has evolved since it’s inception.  Valued at $8 billion in late 2010, outgoing CEO Williams distinguished Twitter from social networking such as FaceBook, claiming that Twitter is that and more.  Twitter, he claims, is a “filter” for the tons of information on the Internet, not only socially, but also politically, economically, musically and many other ways.  For example, people now have devices in their homes that tweet, such as weight scales that tweet your latest weigh-in, tennis shoes that tweet how fast you ran your 5K, arm bands that tweet how long you slept last night, and the like.  It’s Twitter’s job to accumulate, sort, filter and deliver all of these bits of information to the appropriate user without inundating them with useless information as well.  Also in 2010, Evan Williams stepped down from his CEO position and gave it to COO Dick Costolo.  (Williams determined that he didn’t have the expertise and time to devote fully to the CEO job and selected someone who he felt was more capable.)  In 2012, both Stone and Williams re-ignited Obvious, a company that they had started before Twitter, primarily engaged in startup development.

Twitters can be public or private:  Using the @ (a/k/a the “at-symbol handle”; e.g. “At Reply or @reply”) before a reply will be publicly viewed, while placing a D or DM (“Direct Message”) before the Twitter username will make it private to only that person.   Also, the “#” is a “hash” key, which can be used to “tag” a series of entries about the same subject (“topic”; e.g. #swine flu or #demi moore) for future easy access or “following” others’ posts that you find interesting, creating the same sort of community groups you find in blogs.  There is also an advanced search option:  Scroll to the bottom of any Twitter page, click on Search, then click the advanced search link on search.twitter.com

There is a definite viral element to Twitter, which is presently used by over 7 million people, according to co-founder Biz Stone.  In that sense, it is the perfect ego-stroker for those who want to continually broadcast the minutiae of their lives in 140 characters or less.  Also, it’s a virtual popularity contest to see who can rack up the most ”friends” (c’mon, when was the last time, if ever, you had an actual face-to-face with Ashton Kutcher or got invited to Oprah’s house?). 

On the other hand, Twitter does present a perfect vector for malicious code and phishing, especially since most users use bit.ly or tiny.url to fit clickable URLs into their messages.  [These are free programs that reduce the size of a lengthy URL, so that it can easily fit into a webphone browser].

But not only is Twitter a social networking phenom, it is also used by lots of businesses (especially the “celebrity” business), either as a focus group or for customer service or just plain sales.  Businesses can troll for sales leads, referring prospective clients to a web site, use it for market research and follow mentions of their company or products on Twitter, keep an eye on customer service issues, send Tweets to customers about specials, menus or products that may be new or even just out of stock that day, inform people where mobile services will be on any given day, or even post photos of products or completed jobs that promote the company.  I recently noted that the Avon lady and the Tupperware gals have gone techno, and troll for leads and fill orders on Facebook, Twitter and the like.  And often Twittering can have a speedier effect than going to customer service for resolution of problems, particularly in the travel industry, where customer gripes about airline flights and hotel accommodations are sometimes resolved quickly, before they evolve into a virtual snowball of complaints.  Companies pay more attention to Twitters because, unlike e-mail, Twitters can be viewed by literally millions.   Best Buy has introduced Twelpforce (a twitter “help force”) of some 2500 employees that answer consumers’ questions in real time 24 x 7.  Customers who signed up to follow, for example, Gap on Twitter received discount offers exclusively for them.  In addition, many companies have promoted contests and treasure hunts in the hopes of inspiring interaction with their customers.  See also, Blast.  But, as the number of blogs and microblogs post product reviews, paid or otherwise (e.g. classymommy.com, savvyauntie.com), the trend may peak out if it becomes overpopulated.

And, on the political side, Twitter is much less controlled by autocratic governments so that you can follow Tweets, for example, from Barham Salih, Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister, discussing suicide bombs and dust storms in his country in pretty much real time, without his comments being blocked by his government.  On the flip side, Twitter has also been compromised by political hackers as well.   For example, on December 17, 2009, Twitter was hacked by a group identifying itself as the “Iranian Cyber Army” which redirected Twitter users to a web page claiming responsibility for shutting down Twitter.  But even the Pope has tweeted his followers (6/29/11, the 84 year old Pontiff typed on his iPad: “Dear Friends, I just launched News.va. Praised by out Lord Jesus Christ!  With my prayers and blessings, Benedictus XVI”)

Finally, because of its immediacy and brevity, it can be a better form of communication for breaking news, such as hurricane and storm alerts, as many local television stations have discovered.

In November 2011, a site named Twitter Stories (http://stories.twitter.com) was established to show that Twitter is much more than a site for short attention span self obsessed youngsters.  For example, the initial stories included a tale of a man whose tweet (“Sh-t, I need a kidney”) resulted in a donor coming forward just days later, a profile of film critic Roger Ebert (who found an outlet on Twitter after cancer stole his ability to speak) and a Japanese fisherman who uses Twitter to sell his catch each day before even reaching short.

There are various add-ons (“apps”) for Twitter.  For example, you can also post pictures from your cell phone and the like, using TwitPic (which assigns a URL to each photo uploaded) or use Tweet Deck to organize Twitter messages by category.  TweetBeep gives you call alerts; OuTwit adds Twitter to Microsoft Outlook, while Spreadsheet adds it to a faux Excel spreadsheet.  TweetCall takes calls to 1-877-tweetcall from your phone, then coverts the spoken words to text, then tweets through your account.  There’s also TwitterBerry for BlackBerry, Tweetie for iPhones and Twidroid for Android phones, all of which allow you to post photos from your phone camera directly to Twitter.  Mac users can use Twitterific.  For an excellent list of Twitter apps, click HERE. In 2011, Klip was introduced, similar to Twitter, but for sharing of minute-of-less videos.

Twittering also has its own language shortcuts as well: OH = “overheard”;  Twitturgy (religious tweeting); Dweet = tweet sent while drunk; Link = including a URL in your tweet; MisTweet = A tweet one later regrets; ReTweet (RT @/[username]) = To repeat something that’s already in the Twitter stream, giving credit to the original poster; SnapTweet = A tweet including a photo taken with a cell phone, uploaded to Flickr and posted to Twitter via snaptweet.com; Twittcrastination = Procrastination brought about by Twitter use; Twadd = To add someone as a friend or follower; Twaigslist/Twebay = To sell something on Twitter; Tweeter/Twitterer = Someone who uses Twitter; Twiffers = Twitter friends; Twinkedin = Inviting friends made on Twitter to connect to Linkedin; Twittectomy = To remove someone from the list of people you know; Twitterati = The A-List twitters everyone follows; Twitterfly = Twitter’s version of a social butterfly, marked by the extreme use of @ signs; Twitterlooing = Twittering from the bathroom; Twitterpated = Overwhelmed with Twitter messages; Twittfeinated/Twigged Out/Twired = To be so hyped up on twittering that you cannot sleep.  (Credit: Twitter Fan Wiki)

Then there’s “Twitterature,” a book in which 80 works of Western literature are  boiled down into Twitter messages (e.g. “Laertes is unhappy that I killed his father and sister. What a drama queen! Oh well, fight this evening.”) And don’t forget the newly popular “Twaiku,” the Twitter haiku movement.  There is also the use of Twitter to spin out stories in Twitter format in serialized messages (such as John Wray’s spin-off story of a character named Citizen from his well-regarded novel “Lowboy.”)

There are even some on-line directories of public Twitter accounts.  See, for example, Twellow.com. Look for more information about Twittering by using the Twitter Dictionary (a/k/a/ Twittonary).

So how will Twitter make money?  As with many web businesses, this remains to be seen.  There hasn’t been on-line advertising, but Dick Costello, the new CEO appointed in 2010 has discussed the idea of an “organic” advertising platform.  That is, ads have to be in content in Twitter before they can become ads.  For example, if you’re a follower of Virgin America airlines, you may receive a tweet that Virgin is opening service to Timbuktu and you, as a member of the group, can get a 30% coupon.  Same for people who search on Twitter for certain specific key words, like “Virgin America”  or “airline travel”.  But there won’t be any “shotgun” style advertising, tweeting ads to everyone who has an account with Twitter.  Starting in 2012, it appears that Twitter is becoming more advertising driven and therefore more profitable.  The hashtag is becoming more prevalent than the clunkier URL as a short identifier of companies and many advertisements include the Twitter hashtags within them. Because these links connect directly to an ongoing online conversation, they may be preferable to a static web page for many advertisers. 

A big help has come from Apple, since Twitter’s Chief Financial Officer, Ali Rowghani, was the former CFO of Pixar, the late Steve Jobs other major company.  Apple has coded quick access to Twitter on all of its devices for ease of connection.

If you’re looking for more information, there are excellent on-line guides to Twitter:  CNET’s Newbie’s Guide to Twitter; also, The Ultimate Guide for Everything Twitter.

See also, Texting, Social Networking.

The Data page shows current statistics for Twitter as well.