Twitter

Posted by Natasha D'Souza on Apr 13, 2008 in Blog, new media | 0 comments

Everyone is talking about Twitter, Facebook is old news. So what is it? CommonCraft have put together a video to explain this. Another explanation is that it is a social messaging utility.

Some interesting facts

• Twitter began as a R&D project from Obvious
• Twitter is written in Ruby on Rails
• it’s used by many organizations e.g. LA fire department
• was launched in October 2006
• free social networking & micro-blogging service

So how does it work? Updates are called tweets which are text based posts up to 140 characters long. These tweets are sent to the Twitter website via cell phone, instant messaging or third party application like facebook. The updates are delivered instantly and displayed on the user’s profile page. Users that are signed up to receive them will get the message.

Note that delivery to everyone is default and if you want only a few people to receive them you have to restrict them. There are third parties that offer posting and receiving services via email.

Here’s an interview with the co-founder Biz-Stone.

I think it’s time I sign in and figure out what the hype is all about.