Twitter’s speedy expansion made it the target of great attention and a good size of scorn, as it was rediculed as high-tech trivia or the newest time-wasting site. However, its use in Iran curing the conflicted presidential election of June 2009 to put together protests and spread information during a news media crackdown allowed people to see it’s power. Twitter currently only makes money using investors and, as of mid-2009, has around 60 employees. One of the founders, Biz Stone has said that Twitter won’t run ads until 2010, although it has been trying out advertisements. In September 2009, the company was values at around $1 billion.

Twitter has become an significant marketing tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses, offering a level of intimacy never before seen on the internet, as well as giving the public the chance to speak directly to people and institutions. However, even if each tweet is barely a sentence long. In many cases, celebrities have enlisted outside writers — ghost Twitterers, who tweet for them. It is not only celebrities who are forced to look to a team to produce real-time commentary on daily activities, but also politicians like Ron Paul, who have assigned staff members to create Twitter posts and Facebook personas. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign used Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

It has already been proven that Twitter can certainly be used as a self-promotion tool, to promote you content, services and products easily. This can be done by broadcasting your message, even if it’s only 140 characters, to your followers. This sounds an awful lot like blogging, except your message is broadcasted in “real time” to your reader. Twitter is so appealing because it is essentially a mix of blogging, RSS and social networking.

Although at fist sight it may appear that Twitter isn’t able to direct a decent amount of traffic, the truth is, if utilized correctly, it can provide your blog or site with several new visitors. The traffic from Twitter isn’t too shabby either, in terms of quality, most of the visitors that are targeted, stick around, read your posts and even subscribe. You can send traffic to your site by posting your blog’s url in your twitter profile (this will be responsible for most of the regular traffic you’ll receive from twitter) or by Tweeting one of your post’s url. I have witnessed both of these tactics have success. However, the amount of traffic you receive from Twitter is directly linked to number of followers you have.

Twitter, like any other social network, can be used as a powerful tool to build your brand and raise awareness. If you look around a bit on Twitter you’re bound to find users from many popular online and offline brands, that simply track their day to day progress and update with valuable breaking news. The thing about Twitter branding is that it is much more personal, in part to it’s IM like environment.

Many bloggers today see the huge potential that Twitter has for leveraging their content and have started to publicize and promote their blog posts on Twitter. This means either they post their blog post url, along with a short description or the url to various other social media websites like digg or stumbleupon, for example, so that their followers can vote for them. A popular Twitter tool available on the web right now that’s been getting a lot of attention lately is Twitterfeed, a great twitter application that will automatically post your latest blog post titles, along with the respective url without you having to do any extra work.

A couple of months ago I updated my status asking my followers if they knew of any places I could intern at for the Fall semester. I didn’t think I would get any responses, but within a couple of hours I already had several people giving me contacts and inviting me on interviews. Where else can you get this kind of fast response? I soon found that twitter can be an extremely efficient environment for collecting honest and live feedback, ranging from anything like design, to writing, to the over all reader experience.

Because twitter is so instant and spontaneous you can now find out about the latest industry and scene news in a particular field of activity you’re following, within minutes of the actual event. If you thought RSS feeds are a good way of keeping up with news and new content, wait till you try twitter. While telling people what you ate for dinner won’t appeal to many, a lot of people might be interested in what’s your business plans for the day or who’ll you’ll be meeting. Status live updates come especially in handy when you’re on conferences and witness first-hand world premiers.

Twitter is a great way to get to know new and like minded individuals, that share your same passions and area of expertise. Following them truly is a pleasure. This way you can see what your fellow peers are up to, open up to mutual promotional work and build future business relationships. As it’s the case with most social media services, you can use twitter to market and pitch your products. However twitter won’t directly help you market your content, but rather indirectly by helping build your brand name and authority. After you’ve established yourself as an authority to your audience, sales will follow as well.

Technology author Steven Johnson describes the basic mechanics of Twitter as “remarkably simple.”

As a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers. When you choose to follow another Twitter user, that user’s tweets appear in reverse chronological order on your main Twitter page. If you follow 20 people, you’ll see a mix of tweets scrolling down the page: breakfast-cereal updates, interesting new links, music recommendations, even musings on the future of education.

On April 20, 2009, Twitter changed it’s web interface, including a search bar and a sidebar for Trending Topics-the most common phrases currently appearing in messages. “Every public update sent to Twitter from anywhere in the world 24/7 can be instantly indexed and made discoverable via our newly launched real-time search,” explained Biz Stone. “With this newly launched feature, Twitter has become something unexpectedly important-a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now.”

When Twitter has an outage, users get and glimpse of the “fail whale” error message image created by Yiying Lu, an illustration of red birds using nets to hoist a whale from the ocean accompanied by the text “Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.” Twitter had about 98 percent uptime in 2007, or nearly six full days of downtime. Twitter’s downtime was especially noticeable during events or conventions popular with the technology industry such as the 2008 Macworld Conference & Expo keynote address. During May 2008 Twitter’s new engineering team made architectural changes to deal with the scale of growth. Stability issues resulted in down time or short-lived feature removal. In August 2008, Twitter withdrew free SMS services to users in the United Kingdom and for about five months instant messaging support via a XMPP bot was listed as being “temporarily unavailable”. On October 10, 2008, Twitter’s status blog announced that instant messaging (IM) service was no longer a temporary outage and needed to be revamped. Twitter aims to continue its IM service eventually but says that it is in need of some major work. On June 12, 2009, in what was labeled a potential “Twitpocalypse”, the unique identifier associated with ech tweet exceeded the limit for 32-bit signed integers. While Twitter itself was not affected, some third-party clients found that they could no longer view recent tweets. Patches were quickly released, though some iPhone apps had to wait for approval from the App Store. On September 22, the identifier exceeded the limit for 32-bit unsigned integers, again breaking some third-party clients. On August 6, 2009, Twitter and Facebook suffered from a denial-of-service attack causing the Twitter homepage to be offline for several hours. It was later confirmed that the attacks were directed at one pro-Georgian user around the anniversary of the 2008 South Ossetia War, instead of the sites themselves.

Twitter collects personally identifiable information about its users and gives it to third parties. The service views those details as assets, and keeps the right to sell it if the company changes hands. While Twitter includes no advertisements, advertisers can target users based on their history of tweets and may even quote tweets in advertisements. A security vulnerability was reported on April 7, 2007, by Nitesh Dhanjani and Rujith. Since Twitter used the phone number of the sender of an SMS message as authentication, harmful users could update someone else’s status page by using SMS spoofing. The vulnerability could only be used if the spoofer knew the phone number registered to their victim’s account. Within a couple of weeks of this discovery Twitter introduced an optional personal identification number (PIN) that its users could specify to authenticate SMS-originating messages.

After viewing the success of the Obama campaigns’ utilization of Twitter and other social media applications, many other political influencers are finally starting to realize the potential of social media. To date 69 members of the US Congress, Senate (10) and the House of Representatives (50) have Twitter accounts. Admittedly, most of these congressmen rely on their staff to manage their social networking sites and use is limited to announcements of public speaking events and party sponsored news, but a few brave souls are jumping in head first to share their political insights with their constituents. Personally, Twitter is incredibly useful for starting a dialogue with politicians of other parties as well as with journalists and bloggers of all persuasions, who are quite happy to to follow users on Twitter, but who might not wish to ask or accept to be one’s Facebook ‘friend’, in case that were seen to be some kind of endorsement. And the same is true vice-versa! The 140-character limit, although constraining, is actually a very useful discipline, and when well-used, has been compared to a Japanese haiku. As a means of posting a news ‘headline’ or and succinct political point, it is incomparable.

Some people have security concerns about congressmen exposing themselves to this level of transparency in certain sensitive situations. One instance that sparked this concern was when Michigan Republican Pete Hoekstra tweeted while traveling through Iraq and Afghanistan earlier this year. Revealing real time classified information, and making political gibes at members of the opposing political party may not be the best use of the social networking site but in the hands of our country’s leaders, Twitter does have the potential to bring real value to the community.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is just one of several federal agencies using Twitter to communicate with citizens about important health and safety topics. FEMA’s Twitter feed currently boats over 9,300 followers and seems to be moderately active, with many direct replies to followers as well as general tweets about FEMA activities.

The Center for Disease COntrol (CDC) operates several Twitter feeds, including one dedicated to the flu and a general news feed on health topics. The feed most likely to save your life is the one from CDC Emergency Preparedness and Response. This feed has nearly 2,000 followers. Recent Tweets were on the volcano in Alaska, the flooding in North Dakota and food recalls.

People especially concerned about the hazards lurking in their kitchen cabinets and refrigerators will want to follow the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recall feed. The over 14,000 followers of this feed are among the first to know about specific items being pulled off the grocery store shelves.

If you want to be alerted about the most recent medical research, check out the National Institute for Health (NIH) feed. The over 12,000 followers of this feed get updates on NIH podcasts, news, and research matters.

In conclusion, it is not so much that the government has had an impact on technology, rather that the technology has had more of an impact on the government. However, I am sure that will change due to the relatively young life that Twitter has had.

To join Twitter you must go to Twitter.com and click “Join for free.” I used my real name so it is easier for people to find me and better identify with me, but you can choose whatever name you want. I also suggest uploading a picture of yourself for the same reasons. In order to make your updates private, you must click the “Protect my updates” box, but I don’t think that’s a good idea. Many businesses run contests through Twitter and if your updates are protected, your entry won’t show up in their feed.

So let’s assume you signed up for a Twitter account and have told your friends your username or sent them the link to your Twitter page. Each user has their own page, in the form twitter.com/username (Example: my Twitter page is twitter.com/stephdispoto.)

One of the greatest things about Twitter is that you can “tweet” from anywhere. As soon as you have registered, you can set up your mobile phone and instant messenger account. Go to Settings > Phone and IM. Syncing up your mobile phone and IM programs to your Twitter account is fairly simple. Messages you send or receive from either service are still viewable in you online Twitter feed. That’s right, you can even even have Twitter send a message to your phone every time a user who you are following has updated their status. This sounds like a good idea at first and I tried it for a couple of days, but eventually you are going to want to select a limited number of users that you have this setting for. If you don’t wish to be assaulted by a stream of random messages but still want your followers to be able to reach you, select “Direct Message.” This way, when someone sends a message to only you, you will be alerted on your phone or IM account. Otherwise, you won’t get a notification and you might miss out on their query.

You are capable of  sending a Twitter update, or from any of your registered devices. On the Twitter Web page, enter your message in the entry box at the top of the page. From your mobile phone, send an SMS text message to 40404. Your phone’s caller ID is synced to your Twitter account, so the service will know that it is from you. From IM, message TwitterIM. All three of these procedures let your followers see your message on their own Twitter feed and on their mobile devices if they chose to get your updates sent to their mobile.

Now you are capable of sending messages into the real-time Twitter feed, and people can find your account and subscribe to your updates. Here’s how you can view their messages. On the Web: in order to add a friend, you must be logged into your account. Then go to their Twitter page and clock the “Add” button in the “Actions” box. In order to find a user page, use the search box on your homepage. Once you have clicked “Add,” you will begin to see their updates on your page if their account is not set to private. If their account is private, Twitter will send a “friend request” that must be accepted before you begin to see their updates. You are also able to view who your friends are following by clicking on their “Following” link. That brings you to a list of the people they are following including pictures and a short bio. If you click on one of their profiles, you will be brought to that user’s page, where you can choose to add him or her, too. On the phone or IM: send the command “follow” followed by the username of the person you want to follow in order to register your phone or IM account to receive public Tweets from that user. You are also able to invite people based on their phone number: SMS text “add” followed by their phone number to 40404, and you will begin to follow the user with that phone number; if the person  with that phone number is not registered with Twitter, they will receive an invitation to join. Managing your followers and who you are following is much easier by using a full Web browser, but you are capable of doing everything on a mobile phone if you like. Want to be a Twitter nag? Send “nudge” followed by a person’s username and they will get a request to send an up-to-date Tweet.

There are 3 main numbers on your Twitter page:

• The number of “followers” you have. These are the people who are paying following your Tweets.
• The number of “friends” you have. This is the number of people you are following.
• The number of “lists” you are on. This is the number of lists people have grouped you in.

Celebrities and other public figures typically have more followers than friends. Where as, people who spectate more than participate will end up having more friends than followers. People who just use Twitter to communicate just within their own social group will have roughly the same number of friends and followers. Although, these lines have become increasingly more skewed as fake accounts have become norm.

You are able to send a direct Twitter message  that no one else can see to another Twitter user with the “direct” command. Enter “d” followed by their username followed by your message and users will get notified if they have direct messages enabled on their phone or IM account. If you enter a Tweet “@” followed by a username at the beginning of it, your message is understood as being intended for that particular person, although it will be viewed by the public. However, @ replies will not show up on your home page unless you are the intended recipient.

Tons of Twitter messages may be annoying. You’ll probably want to turn them off at some point. To do this: send the commands “off”, “sleep”, “or “stop” to Twitter. To turn it back on, send “on”, “wake”, or “start”. If you’re sick of Twitter online, just don’t visit the site. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done! In a web browser, in your settings, you also can select a period of time during which Twitter will not text or IM you. I use this setting for when I am trying to sleep, but it never seems to work right because I wake up to 20 Tweets!

You can even customize the design of your Twitter home page with ease. I suggest using a simple single-color background and using a contrasting color of links. Photo backgrounds tend to looks outdated and silly.

I have first hand experience with brands who monitor conversations on Twitter using well-crafted search queries. A company may keep an eye on  all conversation about its brand. This way the company can offer better support to customers or potential customers coming across matters requiring realtime solutions or definition. On several different occasions I found myself being followed by specific companies that I had recently Tweeted about. Sometimes they would even reply back to me with a solution or thanking me for a compliment. Twitter does not give a lot of details about the people Tweeting such brand mentions openly in search results at this point in time, which requires extra steps to be taken by brand managers. If Twitter was going to offer a realtime brand management dashboard, what might people like to see on there?

• More content about the person Tweeting every brand mention. What is their name, where are they from, and how many people are subscribed to their updates and subsequently going to see what they post about the brand?
• Easy to use format with existing CRM and customer support systems. Brands should be capable of keeping track of current customers on Twitter by importing a catalog of e-mail addresses.
• Direct messages to Twitter members who are not already subscribed to the brand’s Twitter account should be enabled. Similar to LinkedIn’s paid inMail feature.
• Account analytics. At this point in time, Twitter does not release the number of times a certain Tweet or profile has been viewed, even in channels it has full reign over, such as web or widget views.

Twitter recommends other users that you may be interested in subscribing to. These recommendations appear, or have appeared at some point in the past, on the Twitter homepage, public timeline, and individually-tailored recommendations. Twitter has even tried out having short text-only links directed towards another account in the sidebar of every user. These sponsored listings are currently untapped, under-marketed, or both.

Businesses that primarily run on the internet only have a hand full of choices when it comes to business models. Users visit their website, interact with whatever content is there, and continue onto the next site. Many sites earn a profit by placing advertisements on their site, in their newsletters, etc. It wouldn’t be difficult for Twitter to employ the  same strategy on their homepage. They could also put ads in the Twitter stream of individual users where it would appear like a Tweet, maybe with a link, but Twitter has shied away from all models similar to this. I, personally, am quite thankful that they haven’t because I hate using sites where advertisers rule. It is one of the many downfalls of MySpace and now Facebook, too. Twitter has openly referred to future profit extraction opportunities from corporations on Twitter. Dell, directly calculates profits resulting from its multiple Twitter accounts. Comcast provides “digital care” for its customers through a unique Twitter account. Whole Foods discusses groceries with over 22,000 subscribers. Twitter has yet to generate any type of profit from the thousands of brand connections it houses at this point in time. Brand monitoring will more than likely be the first actual product offered by Twitter.

Maybe Twitter will choose to make a profit by charging users to gain general access to their service.  Perhaps they bill each person $1 per month to use Twitter.  However, this would no-doubt result in a lower number of users. Which would result in less interest from investors so they are really caught between a rock and a hard place as the saying goes.

A business model that would be more successful would provide a primary service for free and have users pay for premium content or bonus features.  Xbox Live has seen great success with this, bloggers see it with Sitemeter, you see this with television as well (over the air is free and you pay extra for cable or satellite). Features would benefit businesses or individuals who are willing to spend anywhere from $1 to $500 a month to gain access to them.  These features could include link tracking, extended character length, embedded media, or priority access to their API.

Another option for Twitter is to follow in the footsteps of Yammer.  Yammer is a tool very comparable to Twitter that provides the same format for corporate users.  This promotes an internal twittering dialogue between employees.  Yammer makes a profit from companies paying a fee in order to gain the administrative rights to their company’s Yammer account.  Twitter could utilize the same exact service, or even provide unique software to businesses that wish to host a service similar to Twitter on their own private servers.  This would be a good route for the company to take in order to switch things up a bit in the future.

I’ll reinstate that at this particular moment in time Twitter does not have an official business model.  They’ have experimented with advertising on their Japanese Twitter site to a certain amount of success and there are have been rumors circulating about a premium account option for businesses.  However, those rumors have been going around since the site launched. I think Twitter has the ability to generate some funds this coming year and I am anxious to see what they come up with.

“The working name was just “Status” for a while. It actually didn’t have a name. We were trying to name it, and mobile was a big aspect of the product early on … We liked the SMS aspect, and how you could update from anywhere and receive from anywhere. We wanted to capture that in the name — we wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word “twitch,” because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But “twitch” is not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word “twitter,” and it was just perfect. The definition was “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds.” And that’s exactly what the product was.” -Jack Dorsey

The original product name or codename for the site was twttr, partially due to the inspiration of Flickr and the fact that American SMS short codes are five characters. The developers started using “10958″ as a short code, but later changed it to “40404″ for ease of use and memorization. The group started working on the project on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey sent the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM: “Just setting up my twttr.”

The first Twitter template was used as a private service for workers at Odeo, but later launched as a fullscale public version in July 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey and other employees of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all of its assets_including Odeo.com and Twitter.com-from the investors and other shareholders. Twitter later spun off into its own company in April 2007.

Twitter’s popularity reached a new level during the 2007 South by Southwest festival. During this one event alone, usage went from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. “The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages,” said Newsweek’s Steven Levy. “Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it. Soon everyone was buzzing and posting about this new thing that  was sort of like instant messaging and sort of like blogging and maybe even a bit of sending a stream of telegrams.” Reaction at SXSW was overwhelmingly positive. Laughing Squid blogger Scott Beale said Twitter “absolutely ruled” SXSW. Social software researcher Danah Boyd said Twitter “owned” the festival. Twitter staff took the prize for the festival’s Web Award with the remark “we’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!”

Since Twitter has only grown in popularity since, many 3rd parties have been getting in on the action creating tool and sites to enhance the service. One example is a service called BigTweet. BigTweet is a plugin for your web browser that lets you post a tweet to Twitter just by clicking the BigTweet button located on your browser’s link menu. Highlighting text on a web page and clicking the button formats a tweet from the text you selected, additionally selecting text from the title of the page and a short URL.

Another more powerful tool is Tweet Later. Tweet Later is a Twitter management application that allows you to accomplish a few critical Twitter tasks automatically. For one, it lets you pre-program “spinnable” tweets in advance. Spinnable means that the tweets can contain alternate words or text that the software chooses from at random. It’s a dynamic technology that allows one tweet to become the basis for numerous individual tweets. Tweet Later will also automatically follow back anyone who follows you and send a “personal” message to all recent followers. Business types are now just beginning to understand Twitters potential as an online marketing tool.

In addition to these creations by third parties, Twitter itself has made some changes. Twitter recently added a search box that allows users to view a real-time feed of any topic imaginable. You can see conversations people are having about a concert, television show, or sporting events. Users have been redesigning Twitter to fit their needs. The idea of grouping a topic or event by the “hashtag”-#hackedu or #inauguration-was spontaneously invented by the Twitter users themselves, in addition to the idea of replying to other users by way of the @ symbol.

Twitter continues to grow and expand to this day. Recently the site has installed a beta version of a “Retweeting” service. Now you just have to click a button to retweet a post instead of copying and pasting an entire tweet into your own feed. Twitter has also come out with a “lists” feature where you can group people into lists such as, “work” or “school”. As an avid Twitter user, I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

Timeline:
1980: UNIX “Talk” allows networked users to exchange real-time text updates
1985: SMS messaging technology is developed for GSM phone
1992: The first SMS message is sent via the Vodaphone network, “Merry Christmas”
1995: Instant messaging as we know it (PowWow, ICQ, AIM) launches, and popularizes the “buddy list”
1997: Birth of the term “weblog”
1999: LiveJournal launches, and allows the creation of virtual communities. Focus is on conversation among groups of linked “friends”
-Birth of the term “blog”
-Evan Williams co-founds Pyra Labs and launches Blogger.com
-Biz Stone helps launch and grow Xanga.com
2000: Jack Dorsey writes software for taxi dispatching, allowing real-time networked status updates
2003: Google acquires Pyra Labs and Blogger
-Google recruits Biz to join the Blogger team
2004: Biz and Ev leave Google
-Ev co-founds Odeo
2005: Jack joins Odeo
Biz joins Odeo
2006: Jack pitches idea of SMS-based status updates to Odea
Biz discovers the “fail whale” image by Yiying Lu on iStockPhoto
-Twitter Beta is launched on Jack’s birthday
-Twitter goes live
-James Cox creates @cnnbrk using 5 lines of Ruby code to send CNN news alerts to his phone
-@johnedwards is the among the first politicians to start twittering
-Twitter wins blog award at SXSW Interactive, spawning the first wave of media interest
2007: @barackobama joins Twitter
-@mtvmoonman tweets the latest updates from the VMAs. Membership booms
2008: Biz sets up Twitter account for @johnmccain campaign so “both candidates would be represented fairly”
-@therealshaq displaces Ward Andrews’ pseudo-Shaq tweets
-@aplusk beats @cnnbrk to 1 million followers
-@The number of tweets exceeds 2,147,483,647 – the limits of signed integers – causing multiple twitter apps to crash. Twitter itself continues to grow.

Dorsey began his company to dispatch couriers, taxies, and emergency services from the Internet in 2000, while he was in Oakland. Other ideas of his during this time period involved systems for medical devices and a “frictionless service market”. Dorsey first got the idea for the realtime status communication in July 2000 after being inspired by Livejournal and possibly AOL Instant Messenger.

When he first encountered the instant messaging service, Dorsey began to envision the software’s user status output being shared among friends easily. He then spoke to Odeo, who at the time was looking into working with text messaging services. Dorsey and Biz Stone agreed that SMS text worked for the status message idea, and produced a prototype of Twitter in almost two weeks. The idea interested many users at Odeo and ultimately investment from Evan Williams who had left Google after selling them Pyra Labs and Blogger.

Cite: Wikipedia

I think Twitter is important to examine and present as my final project because it is still such a new media technology. Recently Twitter has come out with a “lists” feature that is still in the early stages of development and yesterday I got put in a group of Beta testers for a new “retweeting” feature. As a media technology that I frequently use, I figure it would be the perfect one to research so I can learn more about the actually creation and in-depth function of the site.