Answer to Question #236055 in Psychology for Emmanuel Egbuagha

Question

Give a quick overview of Twitter's history. Include references

Answer 1

Twitter, online microblogging service for issuing short messages among groups of receivers via personal computer or mobile telephone. Twitter combines aspects of social networking Web sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, with instant messaging technologies to create networks of users who can communicate throughout the day with brief messages, commonly known as tweets. A user types a tweet via mobile phone keypad or computer and sends it to Twitter’s server, which dispatches it to a list of other users known as followers who have signed up to receive the sender’s tweets by either text message to their mobile phones or by instant message to their personal computers. In addition, users can elect to track specific topics, creating a dialogue of sorts and pushing the number of followers in a given Twitter feed into the millions. Tweets may be on any subject, ranging from jokes to news to dinner plans, but they cannot exceed 140 characters.

Twitter's backgrounds lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Twitter was built using Ruby on Rails, a generalized Web-application framework for the Ruby computer programming language. Its crossing point allows open reworking and incorporation with other online services. The service was designed in 2006 by Evan Williams and Biz Stone, each of whom worked at Google before leaving to launch the podcasting venture Odeo. Williams, who had before created the popular Web authoring tool Blogger, began experimenting with one of Odeo’s side projects which was a short message service then called Twitter. Seeing a future for the product, Williams bought out Odeo and started Clear Corp to further develop it. Engineer Jack Dorsey united the organization team, and the completed version of Twitter debuted at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas, in March 2007. The following month Twitter, was created as a corporate entity.

References

Lennon, Andrew. "A Conversation With Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey". The Daily Anchor. Archived from the original on July 27, 2009. Retrieved June 20, 2009.

Dorsey, Jack (2006). "just setting up my twttr". Twitter. Retrieved June 19, 2009.