Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and by July, the social networking site was launched.
The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 500 million registerd users as of 2012, generating over 340 million twittes daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.
Tweets are publicly visible by default, but senders can restrict message delivery to just their followers. users can tweet via the Twitter website, compatible extrenal applications (such as for smartphones), or by short message service (SMS) available in certain countries.
Users may subscribe to other user's tweets - this is known as following and subscribe are known as tweets or followers, a portmanteau of Twitter and peeps. The users can also check the people who are un-subscribing them on Twitter via various services.
Twitter allows users to upload their profile their mobile phone either by text messaging or by apps released for certian smartphones and tablets. Users can group post together by topic or type by use of hashtags-words or phrases perfixed with a "#" sign. Similarly, the "@" sign folowed by a user names is used for replaying or mentioning to others users. On April 30, 2009, Twitter adjusted its web interface, adding a search bar and a slidebar of "trending topices" the most common phrases appearing in message. Biz stone explains that all messages are instantly indexed and that "with this newly launched feature, Twitter has become something unexpectedly important - adiscovery engine for finging out what is happning right now".
In late 2009, the "Twitter lists" feature was added, making is possible for users to follow (as well as mentioned reply to) ad hoc lists of authors instead of individual authors. The tweets were set to a 140 - character limit for compatibility with SMS messaging, introducing the shorthand nation and slang commonly used in SMS messages.
There are numerous tools for adding content, monitoring content and conversations including Telly (video sharing, old name is Twitvid), Tweet Deck, Salesforce.com, Hot suite, and Twitterfeed. Twitter has mobile apps for iphone, ipad, Android, Windows phone, Blackberry, and Nokia S40. There is also version of the website for mobile devices, SMS and MMS service.
In March 2012, Twitter became available in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu, the first right to left language version for the site. About 13,000 volunteers helped with translating the menu options. In August 2012, beta support for Basque, Czech and Greek was added, making the site available in 33 different languages.
