Twitter Definitions

A useful daily post— Wikipedia's definition for Twitter:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its
users to send and read each others' updates, known as tweets. Tweets are text-
based posts of up to 140 characters, displayed on the author's profile page and
delivered to other users - known as followers - who have subscribed to them.
Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default,
allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website,
Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. The service is free over
the Internet, but using SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and
popularity worldwide. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet",
as it provides the functionality—via its application programming interface
(API)—for other desktop and web-based applications to send and receive short
text messages, often obscuring the Twitter service itself.

Through SMS, users can communicate with Twitter through five gateway numbers:
short codes for the United States, Canada, India, New Zealand, and an Isle of Man-
based number for international use. There is also a short code in the United Kingdom
which is only accessible to those in the Vodafone network.

Estimates of the number of daily users vary, because the company does not release
the number of active accounts. In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester
Research estimated that Twitter had 4–5 million users. A February 2009 Compete.com
blog entry ranked Twitter as the third most used social network, which puts the
number of unique monthly visitors at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly
visits at 55 million, however only 40% of users are retained. In March 2009, a
Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing site in the Member Communities
category for February 2009. Twitter had a monthly growth of 1382%, Zimbio of 240%,
followed by Facebook with an increase of 228%.

SOURCE WITH ACTIVE LINKS

Good Twitter Article in the Newspaper

State of the Art
Twitter? It’s What You Make It
By DAVID POGUE (New York Times)

Writing can be solitary work, but not when you write a tech column. Feedback pours in so quickly — by e-mail, on blogs, in online comments — that it’s almost real-time performance art.

For the longest time, my readers kept nagging me to check out this thing called Twitter. I’d been avoiding it, because it sounded like yet another one of those trendy Internet time drains. E-mail, blogs, chat, RSS, Facebook. ... Who has time to tune in to yet another stream of Internet chatter?

True, there’s nothing quite like Twitter. It’s a Web site where you can broadcast very short messages — 140 characters, max — to anyone who’s signed up to receive them. It’s like a cross between a blog and a chat room. Your “followers” might include six friends from high school, or, if you’re Barack Obama, 254,484 of your most tech-savvy fans. (Incidentally, he hasn’t sent out a single Twitter message since taking office. Where are his priorities?)

Meanwhile, you sign up to receive the utterances of other people. Eventually, your screen fills with a scrolling display of their quips — jokes, recommended links, thoughts for the day, and a lot of “what I’m doing right now” stuff.

Even so, I was turned off by the whole ego thing. Your profile displays how many followers you have, as if it’s some kind of worthiness tally. (See also: Facebook friend counter.)

Then one day, I saw Twitter in action.

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