The American company Twitter, Inc. operates Twitter, a microblogging and social networking site where users can post and engage with messages called “tweets.” Unregistered users can mostly read public tweets, but registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets. Through its APIs, users can interact with Twitter programmatically or through frontend software for mobile or web browsers. Services could be accessed by SMS up until April 2020.
The character limit for tweets was initially set at 140, but in November 2017 it was raised to 280 for languages other than Chinese and Japanese. For the majority of accounts, audio and video tweets are still limited to 140 seconds.
Twitter Foundation
Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams founded Twitter in March 2006, and it went live in July of the same year. With more than 25 offices worldwide, Twitter, Inc. is a California corporation with its headquarters in San Francisco. By 2012, the service was handling an average of 1.6 billion search queries daily, with more than 100 million users posting 340 million tweets each day. It has been called “the SMS of the Internet” and was one of the top ten most visited websites in 2013. Twitter had more than 330 million active users monthly at the beginning of 2019. In reality, only a small percentage of users write the great bulk of tweets.
Elon Musk & Twitter
Sealing the deal are Musk and Twitter. Musk enters the Twitter offices pulling a sink. Musk receives sole possession after the deal is finalized the next day. Musk renames himself “Chief Twit” on Twitter. Musk dissolves the entire Twitter board and becomes the sole director and CEO of the company after letting go of the majority of the management team. According to Musk, he overpaid for Twitter by between 70 and 90% compared to what the company would be valued if shares were allowed to trade freely at the current market price. Elon Musk might have been able to purchase Twitter for as little as $5 billion if he had simply waited a full year. According to this reasoning, Musk may have overpaid for Twitter by as much as $40 billion.
Twitter Features
Twitter provides its users with the following features:
- Tweets
- Adding the Following Content
- Verified Accounts
- Related Headlines Feature
- Polls
- Streaming Video
- Twitter Spaces
- Twitter Blue
Tweets
Tweets are by default publicly available, however, senders can limit message delivery to just their followers. Persons have the option to restrict accounts from seeing their tweets, mute users they don’t want to connect with, and remove accounts from their follower lists.
Users can tweet via the Twitter website, third-party programs that are compatible (such as those for smartphones), or the Short Message Service (SMS) that is accessible in some regions. Users can “follow” other users to receive their tweets, and those who do so are referred to as “followers” or “tweeps,” a combination of the terms “follow” and “peeps” from Twitter. Other users have the option to “retweet,” or forward, specific tweets to their stream.
Adding the Following Content
The likes of Twitter’s own TweetDeck, Salesforce.com, HootSuite, and Twitterfeed.com are just a few of the tools available for adding material, monitoring content, and following conversations. Less than half of tweets were posted through the online user interface as of 2009, with the majority of users preferring third-party programs instead (based on an analysis of 500 million tweets by Sysomos).
Verified Accounts
After receiving criticism from Kanye West and legal action from Tony La Russa regarding fake accounts, the company introduced its “Verified Accounts” service in June 2009. A “blue tick” verification symbol on an account means that, according to Twitter, “we’ve been in contact with the person or entity the account is representing and verified that it is approved.” With the caveat that verification “does not imply an endorsement,” Twitter announced in July 2016 that it will accept public applications before verifying an account “if it is considered to be of public interest.” Exclusively viewing mentions from other verified accounts, for example, is a feature only accessible to users with verified status.
Related Headlines Feature
A tweet will include the websites that referenced it if a website incorporated it into one of their stories. This function was added to Twitter so that if a viewer does not understand what the tweet means, they can click on the site to read more about what the person is talking about.
Polls
Twitter started rolling out the capability to include poll questions in tweets in 2015. Voters are not personally identified, and polls are open for up to 7 days.
In the beginning, polls were limited to two selections and a total of twenty characters per option. Four further possibilities, each with a maximum of 25 characters, could be added later.
Streaming Video
In 2016, Twitter started to put more of an emphasis on live-streaming video programming. They hosted several events, including streams of the Republican and Democratic conventions during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign as part of a partnership with CBS News, Dreamhack, and ESL esports events, and they also won the bid for non-exclusive streaming rights to ten NFL Thursday Night Football games in the 2016 season.
Twitter Spaces
Users can host or take part in a live-audio virtual environment termed a “place for discourse” using the social audio function on Twitter called “Twitter Spaces.” There is no limit to the number of listeners that can fit in a space. There can be a maximum of 13 individuals on stage at once (1 host, 2 co-hosts, and 10 speakers). Users with at least 600 followers could use the function at first. Every Twitter user will be able to create a Space through the Android or iOS app starting on October 21, 2021.
Twitter Blue
Twitter introduced the Twitter Blue service in 2021. This service offers features only available to those who subscribe to the Twitter Blue service. They consist of:
- Undo Tweet enables users to take back a tweet before it is published for a brief period.
- Users can save specific tweets into folders using bookmarks.
- Twitter threads are rendered as articles in the reader mode.
- The mobile app for Twitter has color schemes.
- Dedicated help for customers.
