Twitter

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables users to post their latest updates. The purpose of it is for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected. It was founded in March of 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and started by Obvious Corp. Users are able to update their posts through SMS text messaging, instant messaging, email, and Twitter’s website. Answers must be under 140 characters in length. In addition, each user has their own profile page that displays their most recent updates. You can become friends with other people- similar to Facebook- or plainly be a follower. Not only can you read other people’s posts and profile page, but you can also receive other people’s updates through text messages, RSS or third party applications. Although users may have to pay text messaging charges, Twitter itself is a free networking service. In all countries around the world, people can follow the sources most important to them and access information from breaking world news to updates from friends. These updates are also known as tweets.
Because it gives the public the ability to speak directly to people and institutions, Twitter has become an important marketing tool for celebrities, businesses, and politicians. In fact, celebrities turn to outside writers, known as ghost Twitterers, to keep fans updated on the latest news, frequently in the celebrity’s own voice. This website could be good for social networking, entertainment, and news. However, many people complain that Twitter is not good for news. Some people feel that it is boring and a waste of time. It could also be potentially dangerous to businesses and the marketplace.
Like several existing communication technology, Twitter can be abused as well. There are many people that recklessly use this micro-blogging application with no purpose or reason. For example, someone ran an online hate campaign against another person by setting up a false Twitter account and made tweets to it pointing to websites that supported his hate campaign. Additionally, marketers use Twitter to attract victims to their scams. As you can see there are both positives and negatives about using Twitter.



http://www.crunchbase.com/company/twitter
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/twitter/index.html