With 1,382% monthly growth, 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits Twitter is one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide by Alexa's web traffic analysis. While many websites have been seeking to enter at least the top 100 list of Alexa for years Twitter seems to have climbed to upper positions with a pace of young cheerful and self-confident boy. While it covers only slightest piece of the Internet auditorium still there is almost no one on the cyber space who have never heard of tweeting and instant messaging through the Twitter social network that allows in no time to deliver your message to anyone or to the whole world. Even largest corporations and companies do not disregard this pool of immense potential and opportunities. Almost each of the reputed and authoritative business has its own profile using which they inform their customers about new products and services immediately. We decided to take a closer look at the service and make our own review that we think will more comprehensive than many others you can find online.
Follow me and tweet me
In 2000 the idea for the realtime status communication came to Dorsey as he was inspired by LiveJournal and possibly by AOL Instant Messenger. The implementation of the instant messaging prompted Dorsey to invent the tool that could allow sharing user status among friends. Thus he approached Odeo, who at the time happened to be interested in text messaging. Dorsey and Biz Stone decided that SMS text suited the status message idea, and built a prototype of Twitter in about two weeks.
It was not at once that the enthusiasts of the new microblogging service found the name for their creation. Jack Dorsey narrates:
The working name was just "Status" for a while. It actually didn’t have a name. We were trying to name it, and mobile was a big aspect of the product early on ... We liked the SMS aspect, and how you could update from anywhere and receive from anywhere.
We wanted to capture that in the name — we wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word "twitch," because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But "twitch" is not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word "twitter," and it was just perfect. The definition was "a short burst of inconsequential information," and "chirps from birds." And that’s exactly what the product was.
Initially the code name for the microblog was twttr which was prompted by the name of the popular picture website Flickr as well as in consideration of the American SMS short codes that have only 5 characters. The developers initially experimented with "10958″ as a short code, though later changed it to "40404″ for "ease of use and memorability." The first message through Twitter was sent by Dorsey on March 21, 2006 at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): "just setting up my twttr".
So what is Twitter after all? It is a social networking site based on microblogging services using which people can send and read messages called ‘tweets’. Tweets usually don’t exceed 140 characters and they are displayed on the author’s profile page as well as delivered to the subscribers of this author who are called ‘followers’. Messages can be received either on the Twitter website itself or through Short Message Service (SMS) as well as external applications.
Originally Twitter asked the question "What are you doing?" and in November 2009 the company decided to more focus on its news and information strategy and changed the question to "What's happening?".
Steven Johnson, an American popular science author, describes the basic mechanics of Twitter this way: “As a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers. When you choose to follow another Twitter user, that user's tweets appear in reverse chronological order on your main Twitter page. If you follow 20 people, you'll see a mix of tweets scrolling down the page: breakfast-cereal updates, interesting new links, music recommendations, even musings on the future of education.”
Twitter inside
The work with Twitter is simple and does not require any special preparations or preliminary knowledge. You just type the domain name of the website into the address bar of your Internet browser and here you are on the Twitter home page.
Registration
In order to subscribe for an account you just need to push the button Sing Up Now. And the registration process starts immediately. At the registration you will have to specify your name, your email address and create your login credentials.
After you provided this information Twitter asks you if you want to check whether your friends are also on Twitter. For these purposes you will have to type in your email password. But can certainly skip this step. When Twitter finds everyone in your email contact book it will suggest you to invite these people join the microblog. You may also skip this step. At the end Twitter offers to follow a number of some popular people who use the service. You may mark only several of them or you may follow them all. The list contains 20 names.
Profile
This is how it’s easy! Now you can personalize your profile. You can add your picture and change the background of your member area. For this purpose just enter the Settings section and choose Picture for uploading your photo and Design for changing the colors and theme of your profile.
Additionally you can set the phone number that will be used for sending and receiving the tweets.
Messaging
So, in order to post your tweet you just type a message that as we have already mentioned above should not exceed 140 characters. The message is entered into the box that you can see immediately when you enter your member area. If you visited other sections or pages on the website and now you want to type a message you just need to click Home button. Right in the center of you home page you can see the blank box. You enter your utterance and press Update.
After you post a message you cannot change it. The only way for you is to delete the incorrect message. Apart from tweets there are other messages used on Twitter which include replies and direct messages.
An @reply is a public message sent from one person to another, distinguished from normal updates by the @username prefix. If a message begins with @username it is considered as a reply.
Direct messages are private messages sent from one Twitter person to another. You can only send a direct message to a person who follows you. Every received direct message is saved into the inbox.
Who are there?
According to Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media, the significant part of the Twitter audience is comprised of older adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter. He says: "Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years” Meantime, comScore reports that only 11% of Twitter's users are aged 12 to 17.
While initially the service was meant as a means to allow your friends and relatives stay aware of what is happening to you today Twitter gives much information about the latest developments in the lives of favorite actors, singers, sport starts and of course our politicians. Many prominent people use Twitter to report latest events related either to their work or their personal life. Thus, Barack Obama, Nicole Kidman, Sergey Brin, Jack Dorsey himself and other celebrities have profiles on Twitter.
According to the categorization made by a Wikipedia author Twitter is used in these notable areas:
• Campaigning
• Legal proceedings
• Education
• Emergencies
• Protests and politics
• Public relations
• Space exploration
• Surveys
How Twitter makes money… for others
On its website in the About Us section the developers and workers behind Twitter placed a posting that answers the question “How do you make money from Twitter?” The answer is:
Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don't want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world. While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.
“We spend more money than we make” this phrase describes the financial state of affairs at the Twitter company. In fact according to the financial documents which were published on TechCrunch after they were retrieved by a hacker in 2009 Twitter expects to have revenues of $400,000 in the third quarter (Q3) and $4 million in the fourth quarter (Q4) along with 25 million users at the end of the year. How the company plans to achieve these goals remains unknown. Meantime, the analysts say that without sustainable revenue the viability of the company is doubtful.
On the other hand Twitter helps many companies make money from the marketing opportunities abundantly available for businesses. Companies create personal relationship with their customers and after they collected a number of followers they can directly inform them about the latest updates in their product lines. For instance, this week Dell reported that its global reach on Twitter has resulted in more than $6.5 million in revenue.
Besides, Twitter also provides many opportunities for individuals in that it can help ordinary people find a job, for example. Using the Twitter Search a person can look for ‘hiring’, ‘recruitment’ or ‘job’ keywords and find a potential work.
Conclusion
Actually, Twitter is not a unique phenomenon, at least in our view. And we will likely agree that the abundance of the information in numerous tweets posted on the microblog does not serve you good. At best you will just waste your time. But in some cases surely Twitter works to our use allowing for instance to learn in seconds what new product was released by Dell or Apple or what new article was posted by Associated Press. But for these purposes we would have to sit day and night in the Twitter account and look at the changing screen where every second you can see new tweets.
Some people cite a number of advantages coming with Twitter. They say that the service helped them be more laconic when typing messages to their friends or business partners. They say that now they spend less money on telephone calls and instead they write more short messages with accurately selected phrases. Maybe Twitter was the only tool for them to learn such essential skills.
Anyway, we can say that there are many services that combine microblogging with email, friends and classmates websites and many other options. They seem more attractive and convenient than Twitter where people report each other the things they could say via chat or IM. Still, tastes differ, may be the need in Twitter is determined by the diversity considerations or may be redundant gismo will turn some day into irreplaceable instrument.
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