Twitter is a free, real time, short messaging, social networking site launched in 2006. It involves micro blogging which is where users post updates of what they are doing at that current time, in no more than 140 characters. Users can send and receive updates even if they aren’t at a computer through SMS, email or applications such as twitterific (a client used on Iphones and the Ipod touch). Users can also view other peoples tweets on their phones.
Twitter is used for many different reasons. The main reason that twitter is used (or so it says on the homepage of its website) is to keep in contact with friends, family and co-workers to find out exactly what it is they are up to. However it can also be used in a professional manner, in which contacts can be found in order to discuss different topics, of similar professions. Twitter is also used by ‘celebrities’ or of people on their behalf to talk about what they are doing at the moment. For example, Britney Spears has a Twitter account. According to one newspaper article in the New York Times, Twitter is also used by terrorists to coordinate their movements, activities and attacks.
Tweets have to be 140 characters or less. In order to add more context to the tweets, Twitter uses hashtagging. Hashtags are basically a way of adding additional context and metadata to tweets. They are similar to tags on Flickr etc. however they are inline with your tweet – added on to the end of it. They are created by simply prefixing a hash symbol (#) to a word.
There are also different ways of just viewing peoples tweets, for example by then use of Twittervision. Twittervision is a real time geographical visualisation of posts to twitter. It is basically a picture of the world (powered by Google). Once someone, somewhere in the world, posts a tweet, their location and their tweet will appear on the map, with an arrow pointing to that location. It can be zoomed right out to the whole world or zoomed right in and you can see what street the person is posting from. Twittervision can also be seen in a 3D version where you can see the world as a globe as opposed to the original view which is a flat version of the world. As well as being available online, it is also available as an application on Iphones and the Ipod touch.
Twitter also has a ranking system. It seems that there are few versions of this ranking system. One of the ones that I found was a website called twitterholic. On this website, is a list of the 100 best ‘twitterholics’ according to followers. Currently Barack Obamas page is leading with 108,840 followers.
