Social media interactivity on the internet is turning our world into a global village. Millions of social marketing sites are gaining popularity. There are plenty of types of social interactivity, and one of them is microblogging, which is getting very popular very quickly.

Microbloging is ideal for users who enjoy writing small snippets, or tweets, rather than longer blog posts. The short messages appear as a stream of conversations in reverse chronological order, similar to traditional weblogs. Users can make their updates public or private so only specific users can view them. They can also add and delete friends, just like on a social networking site.

In the current arena, there are still very few microblogging sites out there, but the competition is going on. Twitter, the most famous microblog site, limits messages to 140 characters. Pownce and Jaiku, which were purchased by Google, are also well-known microblogging sites.

Right now, the king of the microblogging world is Twitter, so that is what I am going to focus on today.

Foundation of Twitter:

“Twitter began as a research and development project inside San Francisco start-up company Obvious, LLC in March 2006. It was initially used internally by the company, and officially launched in October. The CEO of Twitter, Inc. is Jack Dorsey.”

Technology used:

Twitter is written using Ruby on Rails.

What is twitter?

Twitter is basically a free social networking and microblogging service that permits users to send text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates can be received by users through instant messaging, SMS, emails, twitter.com, RSS and by using applications like Facebook and Twitterrific. Registered users can see the updates displayed on their profile page. It has a very simple API that covers the entire functionality.

To use Twitter, all you need to do is sign up for a free profile on their website. The next step is to create your account and customize your profile. Now you are ready to start sharing and following your friends, family members and even strangers and find out what they are doing right now.

Visitors to the Twitter website have peaked at nearly 500,000 in July 2007 and have leveled off to that rate in the ending months of 2007.

Challenges:

There are numerous challenges for Twitter related to its growing user base. Twitter’s fans say that it’s a good way to keep in touch with busy friends, but some users start using Twitter too much, which can be very annoying for moderate users. This can cause inboxes that are inundated with one user’s updates and higher cell phone bills. Some users can become irritated with reading every activity in a users day, like what they are eating for meals, what time they wake up in the morning and what kind of cat food they bought. These issues were reported on by The Wall Street Journal.

“These social network or social networking services elicit mixed feelings in the technology savvy people who have been their early adopters.”

Twitter has also faced major security vulnerabilities which were reported on April 7, 2007 by Nitesh Dhanjani. After a few weeks this problem was solved and Twitter introduced an optional PIN that its users can use to authenticate SMS originating messages.

Prominent Twitter users:

Prominent Twitter users include U.S. presidential candidates John Edwards and Barack Obama, author and journalist Anna David, author Warren Ellis, Stargate Atlantis actor David Hewlett, podtech.net blogger Robert Scoble, Xbox blogger Larry Hryb, noted Hollywood doorman Andrew Brin , and tech pod caster Veronica Belmont( as well as many others).

References:

1. http://notaland.com/rakusai/7475
2. http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter
3. http://www.iconnectdots.com/ctd/2008/04/twitter-one-mor.html
4. http://newkidson.blogspot.com/2008/01/twitter.html

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Related posts:

1. Twitter vs. Pownce
2. FriendFeed and Twitter – are they Competitors?
3. Digsby – Another Promising Social Networking Tool
4. Web 2.0 and Social Networking: An Overview