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Twitter

Updated : Wednesday 30 November 2011

This was the first microblogging social network. Twitter was born in 2006 in San Francisco. The user can tell the community of Twitter subscribers what he or she is doing, or comment on what they’re seeing or hearing, in not more than 140 characters (hence the term ”microblogger”). With Twitter it’s very quick to send out a short message to the entire Twitter community online or from your mobile phone. You can use your own name or a pseudonym; it’s up to you. It’s a bit like sending the same SMS to 100 people with just one touch. There are over 200 million people tweeting worldwide, and the network itself is growing exponentially (up by 752% in 2008). You can use Twitter to send free SMS as notifications by SMS are free in some countries, allowing you to consult the entire Twitter community at the same time.

Lady Gaga was the first to top 10 million "followers" worldwide, with Britney Spears and Barack Obama also in the big league. Ashton Kutcher is at number 6 according to the Guardian ranking, while his wife Demi Moore comes in at 28. Britain’s favourite "intellectual" comedian, Stephen Fry, has 3 million followers, and the Prime Minister’s office is popular too.

This is the darling of the internet, much used by news junkies. Many bloggers now tweet, which lets them give brief updates on news as it happens, or tell their “followers” on Twitter about a new website or blog that has caught their eye. Twitter is increasingly used by the media who treat the network like a press agency that feeds them news ahead of the competition. Twitter, for example, was the first to break the news of the plane crash in the Hudson or more recently of the Haiti earthquake. They use Twitter to appeal for witnesses and extend their sources of information. The editors of The Guardian even asked members of Twitter to verify whether members of parliament in the UK had published their expense claims on their websites. Twitter is also used more and more for business monitoring. A company need only make a daily search of its company name on Twitter to know who’s saying what about them today. This way, they can react to adverse rumours before the buzz takes hold across the internet. Twitter is also even used as a tool for political propaganda. Witness the young Tunisians who used Twitter to make their voices heard, to overcome the censorship imposed by the government on the traditional media and urge the international community to distance itself from President Ben Ali. Thanks to Twitter, they were able to coordinate the demonstrations aimed at overthrowing those in power. While Twitter was not enough to cause the government to fall in Iran, in Tunisia it was social networks, and Twitter in particular, that were largely instrumental in bringing about the fall of Ben Ali. So — Twitter as a weapon of war?
In any event, 50% of hirers in the United States use Twitter to gather information on their applicants. Some people use Twitter for personal reasons, to launch searches, as in: help I’ve lost my mobile phone in Oxford Street. But, because everything is speeded up on Twitter, rumours breed faster here than anywhere else. Websites like fakeawish.com even let you start your own: you can fake an announcement of the death of your favourite celebrity, broadcast the news on Twitter, and watch as it’s retweeted thousands or even millions of times, isn’t that exciting?