Twitter has become one of the leading social networking sites available on the Internet today.
It is a type of microblogging site that allows people to send and read other user messages called tweets.
Tweets are message posts in text.
They can be up to 140 characters in length.
Each person's tweets show up on his or her profile page.
Other users may subscribe to the authors tweets which is called following.
A user that has subscribed to a particular author is called a follower.
Recently, Twitter added the ability to subscribe to lists of authors, rather than subscribing to each one individually.
All users of Twitter may send and receive messages on the Twitter website.
They also give you the ability to have tweets sent directly to your smartphone using Short Message Service (SMS).
Even though the Twitter website is free, your cell phone provider may charge you for receiving SMS messages.
Twitter was created in 2006 by a man named Jack Dorsey.
Currently, Twitter has more than 100 million users worldwide.
It is often referred to as the "SMS of the Internet.
" Twitter came about after a daylong brainstorming session that was held by the podcasting company Odeo.
During the session, Jack came up with the idea of using SMS to communicate with a small group of people.
He was partially inspired by a SMS group called TXTMob.
Jack says, "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.
" The project name was initially called twttr, inspired by Flickr and the 5 character limit of SMS short codes.
Initially, the developers considered "10958" as a short SMS code, but later changed it to "40404" in order for it to be remembered more easily.
The first tweet was done at 9:50pm (PST) on March 21, 2006 and said 'just setting up my twttr.
' It was first setup for internal use by the Odeo Company, and the first full version was released to the public in July, 2006.