Are you a socialite? I mean online! Then a social networking website should be your address. A live feed about your existence, mood, excitement, happiness, sorrow is sent to the entire world. Communication is sent and received at any time of the day, irrespective of where you are located geographically. The influences of social networking websites have increased the frequency of communication and availability of information to all those connected with you.

Twitter – Tweets!!

What is “Twitter”? What are “Tweets”? Well, “Twitter is basically a social networking website and “Tweets” are the messages sent and received among the users of this networking site. The user of the website is called the “author” and his contacts or subscribers are called the “followers”. This network is available to users at zero cost. The messages sent are limited to 140 characters. Since tweets can also be received and sent through mobile phones in the form of Sms, the 140 characters restriction offers compatibility for the service.

Twitter was introduced in the year 2006, by Jack Dorsey. In a very short span of time twitter has gained huge popularity. It is popularly known as the “SMS of the Internet”. Twitter has been ranked among one of the most used websites and the website with maximum traffic. Figuring in one of the most used websites ranking conducted by Neilson.com, twitter has a monthly growth rate of more than 1000%.

How it all began?

Twitter’s design was clearly based the short messaging service used by mobile users. A full scale version of Twitter was released in July 2006. John Dorsey one of the board members of a podcasting company named Odeo, was the brain behind “Twitter”.

Initially introduced as a product of Odeo, Twitter became a full fledged company in the 2007. The trigger point for Twitter’s service was at the South by Southwest festival, the number of tweets per day increased from 20000 to 60000 tweets per day. In short twitter just ruled the festival.

Twitter Financing

The company slowly grew from a $5 million mark to $57 million, with funding from a number of venture capital companies including Benchmark Capital, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. While the inside sources reveal a $1.54 billion revenue projection and 1 billion users by 2013, the information is to have been hacked from their internal projections

The Twitter Technology

Twitter is based on the simple mobile technology. The technology is similar to that of Web based Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The Twitter technology helps users tweet even through their mobile phones using their five digit short code.

The Twitter technology is based on the principle of followers. Any tweet posted by the user, appears on the reverse order in the twitter home page of the followers. April this year, twitter introduced the concept of indexing the messages sent, thereby acting as search or rather a discovery engine of happenings taking place currently.

Tweets!!

Now what are these tweets all about? On analyzing a list of 2000 tweets over a period two weeks, the tweets received where classified into six categories, meaningless chatting, promotional tweets, spam, news, conversation, simple forwards. Pointless babbles figured for 40% of the 2000 tweets analyzed.

While the user group aged between 12 to 17 years account for only 11% of twitter users, adults are catching up for the rest. According to reports Twitter had an uptime of 98% in 2007, the better the uptime, and the more the usage. “Fail Whale” indicates the error message, that the tweets where not delivered. In August this year twitter and face book suffered out what is called the “denial of service attack” and was resolved, after hours of downtime.

Security is at high risk. Twitter uses some of the most personalized information of its users; well it is upto to the user to go for it. Micro blogging, networking, staying connected portray the characteristics of a social networking website; the concept of “staying too connected” is not going well with everyone.

Twitter’s user retention rate is about 40%, which shows people loose interest after about a month. Want to know how twitter is being used otherwise than for all useless babbles? Well here it is.

• Public Relation Services
• Survey
• Emergencies
• Educational Updates
• Law and Legalities
• Promotional and Campaigning
• Protest
• Politics
• Exploration

A discussion on social networking websites are endless, if you are a twitter user and would like add on to this post, you are most welcome. Share your experience with us.