Twitter Tweets for All You Tweeps

A micro blogging and an online social network service, Twitter lets its members read and send posts that are based on text for up to one hundred and forty characters, known as a 'tweet.'

Created by Jack Dorsey in March of '06, Twitter was launched in July of that year. Rapidly, this service gained in global popularity with more than three hundred million users as of the year '11.

This generated more than three hundred million tweets and handles approximately one-point-six billion daily searching queries. It has been called the internet's SMS.

Based in San Francisco, Twitter has extra servers and offices in NYC. The origin of Twitter lies in a session of brainstorming the entire day held by the Odeo company podcast board members.

The idea was introduced by Dorsey who mentioned the idea of a person using a service of SMS to communicate with a group that was small.

The service project code name originally for this was TWTTR, said to be inspired by the 5-character lengths of American SMS short codes and Flicker.

Work on Twitter began on the twenty-first of March in '06 when Dorsey published the 1st message on Twitter at nine-fifty PM PacificStandardTime.

By default, tweets are visible publicly. However, messages can be restricted in deliver by senders to just their followers.

Tweets can be through smartphones, SMS or via the website of Twitter. Although this is a free service, using SMS to access Twitter can incur fees for phone service providers.

As a user, you can subscribe to other people's tweeting, and become known as a 'follower' or a 'tweep' (twitter plus peep).

You can also find the people who are 'unfollowing' you just as much as you can find the ones who are following you.

Profile updates are possible for users of Twitter through text messages, tablets, smartphones or mobile phones.

Having been compared to an IRC or InternetRelayChat web-based client, the Twitter basic mechanics are quite simple.

When SMS is utilized for Twitter communication, there are five number gateways.

This includes short codes for New Zealand, India, Canada and the United States, plus a number based on an Isle of Man for global access.

The United Kingdom features a short code accessible only for those with networks that include Orange, O2 and Vodafone.

Since only Bharti Airtel tweets are supported by Twitter in India, there is also a platform alternate called smsTweet, set up by users to work on every network.

For mobile users of phone in Malaysia and Singapore, a platform called Gladly Cast has been set up.

Initially, the messages were set up to be one hundred forty characters to be compatible with SMS messages.

This has introduced the slang notation shorthand used in text messaging and has also increase the use of URL Shortening services like tr.im, goo.gl and bit.ly.