The founders of Twitter services formed a company named Odeo after one of them had launched a blogging service called BLOGGER which was bought out by GOOGLE. Evan Williams subsequently worked for GOOGLE and in due course moved out to form a new company Odeo with Biz Stone. This company then launched Twitter. This new service for messaging was named so due to the nature of messaging activity being similar to the calling of the birds. That is a refreshing theory behind the concept of the name of this social networking service.
The service has been gaining importance since its inception. Williams bought out Jack Dorsey of Odeo as well as Twitter and formed a new company which was Obvious Corporation. Dorsey joined in and worked on Twitter where they developed a new strategy of messaging. They included Twitter’s featuring in email and messaging services where users could switch to Twitter and check out their friends. Then Twitter came out of Obvious Corporation to establish Twitter Incorporated in the year 2006.
How Twitter Works and How can it be used?
There are several service providers who give user simple services of building one’s profile or put in their pictures or send messages or even compile programs into their home page. Blogging and writing in forums is also an included activity. As far as social networking is concerned there’s Facebook, My Space and the likes doing this while there is a new service founded in 2006 called Twitter.
Signing up at Twitter you can create or import contacts and send them messages. These messages are invites mostly but you can send Direct Messages too, one can use Twitter to make informal gathering at different venues called Tweetups and have a bash. From twitter you do not need to send a dozen mails and messages. Instead you can sign in to Twitter and write a message which would be a maximum of 140 characters and broadcast it over the web, it would be visible to everyone who have the link called permalink of the message called status, however you can make your messages or statuses or updates private too by configuring the settings likewise. These statuses also reach or come in the twitter stream of someone following you. You can follow anyone on twitter, however if someone has protected their statuses now commonly called as tweets, you would have to request access to their tweets. People can follow you or more precisely follow your updates/tweets/statuses but you can choose who should follow you by using block feature. You can reply to anyone’s tweet by typing in the message/reply and including their username with a prefix @ with no spaces in between like “@USERNAME message…”, you can put @username anywhere in the message, such messages in which a person’s username has been mentioned are collected in mentions timeline in one’s home screen. Direct Messages can be sent only to people following you, while you can reply or receive a reply from anyone using twitter.
