Twitter is a micro blogging and social networking service that allows it’s users to send and recieve messages known as “tweets”. These are short messages of a personal or informative nature. The service is free and widely used. “Tweets” are posts that can be no longer that 140 charecters long and are viewable on the user’s profile page. These “tweets” are also sent to other users, known as followers, who have subscribed to them.
These short messages allow users to communicate with all of their followers at once. They also allow users to keep apprised of what those that they are following are doing and thinking. Messages can be posted as often as the user would like, while there is a limit of charecters in each post there is no limit on how many posts can be made.
Senders are able to set the delivery of their “tweets” to allow anyone access or to only allow their friends. Allowing access to anyone is the default setting and should be changed if the user does not desire public access to his or her “tweets”. Twitter users can send “tweets” through Short Message Service (SMS), through the Twitter website, or through a variety of applications like TweetDeck and Tweetie. SMS might cost service provider fees, but the service is free on the internet.
Twitter was created in 2006 and has since become very popular worldwide. Twitter has gained such popularity that many celebrities and prominant figures have begun to use it. Users such as Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Ellen DeGeneres, P’Diddy and many others use Twitter to keep in touch with friends and family, get messages out to fans, and deliver important news. Politicians have even come under scrutiny for useing Twitter at innapropriate times.
Twitter does have areas of vulnerability, security being one of them. The security problem stemed from twitter using the SMS message originator for the authentication of a users account. Since the discovery of this problem Twitter has created an option to use a PIN in order to authenticate messages that orriginate from SMS. Twitter also gathers information of a personal nature and sells it to third parties. Twitter considers this information to be property and reserves the right to sell this information.
Twitter services have aided in times of emergency letting messages with information and instructions spread quickly to a large number of people. Twitter is an effective service for quick messaging and in the third most widely used social networking service. Since its creation in 2006 Twitter conintues to gain poularity and usefullness year after year. The many uses of Twitter and the ease of use is likely why such a young company has grown so large and gained so much momentum.
