Twitter is an free social networking service which enables users to send the short messages (i.e., limited to just 14o characters) to your friends, family, co-workers or so called “Followers” in real time. This is simply called ‘tweets’. It was created on March 2006 and was launched by July 2006.
In twitter, registered users can read and post tweets but unregistered users can only read the tweets. User can access twitter through the website interface, SMS or mobile device application.
Twitter has more than 500 million users, out of which more than 302 million are active users.
You can communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question like: How are you?
Message restriction of 140 characters has resulted in Twitter being labelled “Micro blogging” and gained a lot of buzz with its platform for sharing messages in short.
Using Twitter, You can restrict delivery to your circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Also you can use third party application such as Tweetie, Twitterrific, and Feedalizr to send Twitter messages. And also you can search for people by name or user name, import friends from other networks, or invite friends via email.
Twitter has many features like,
Tweet – Every time you post a status update or post to Twitter this is what is called a tweet. Each tweet can consists of a maximum of 140 characters in length and can contain text, web links, a photo, # hashtags and @ (At).
Links – According to the t.co service in Twitter, it shortened the web links posted in Tweets. Any web link of any length will be altered to 22 characters, even when the link itself is less than 22 characters long. The Character count will reflect this, when viewing the Tweet on www.twitter.com the original URL will be displayed.
Photo – Twitter allows the user to upload one image per Tweet. In addition Twitter will only display one image from third-party apps, although you can include as many links to third-party hosted photos as you like. Only approved followers will be able to see photos from accounts with protected Tweets. In Twitter, there is some file size and format requirements, file size of an image can be upto 3MB and the format should be one of the following GIF, JPEG or PNG format.
Hashtag (#) – The “#” symbol, known as a hashtag, which is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages. Most of the sales professionals and companies commonly use hashtags to tweet out content or updates about events and products.
AT(@) – The “@” symbol is used to call out usernames in a Tweet. The At (@) symbol is a common one but it seems confused sometimes. If tweet start with a “@” at the beginning, only the recipient and their shared followers can see the tweet. By tweeting with the “@” anywhere other than the beginning, all of your followers can see the tweet.
Retweet(RT) – ReTweet is used in twitter to know how your tweeting for something that was posted by another user.
Direct Message(DM) – Direct messages enable you to send a private message directly to a person you follow by using their Twitter username. Direct messages do not show up in your Twitter feed and is like a 140-character email.