Twitter Draft One
From DigitalRhetoricCollaborative
Twitter is a micro-blogging platform utilized by 288 million active users a month.[1] The "tweets" allow users 140 characters per post for optimal mobile readability.[2] Twitter, Inc. was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Its name is based off the chirping noise that birds make, similar in idea to the concise messages of tweets.[3] Compared to other websites, Twitter ranks eighth in the United States and eighth globally.[4] Twitter claims that 77% of total accounts are located outside of the U.S.[5] Users primarily use Twitter on mobile devices over desktop or tablet devices.[6] A platform combining social networking and news, Twitter's mission is "to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers."[7]
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Technology
Twitter is an open source software with several contributions to various projects.[8] The company uses GitHub to share and allow the public to contribute to the code.[9] The community receives free license to use or edit the software however they like.[10] Thirty-one data fields accompany every tweet sent to preserve its independence in any context. The application programming interface can provide metadata to anyone with an API key, including the location of every tweet ever sent down to the exact latitude and longitude.[11]
Medium
As a medium, Twitter was originated to be the "SMS of the web". Users have been known to use the social media platform as a way to communicate with friends, brands, and celebrities. An evolution of Twitter has been the development of the tool as a news platform. Easy functionality to share breaking news via the medium include its immediacy and shareability. Information has the potential to reach millions of users in minutes. The risk with citizen journalism is the potential to share incorrect information, as was the case during the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings when the wrong suspect's identity went viral. When composing a tweet, Twitter encourages the latest happenings by asking "What's happening?" in the text box. The service does not show a complete history of all tweets by a user and the timeline organizes tweets by the most recent as opposed to most relevant.[12]
Timeline
The first tweet ever sent was by Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006.[13]
The company is responsible for the creation of the hashtag via a tweet by Chris Messina in August 2007.[14]
The evolution of Twitter's logo from it's founding in 2006 up to the present.[15]
