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To reach heaven

“In the sky, just talking about the sea tweeter. How damn cool to watch a huge fireball ... and tweet, tweet, tweet! "
And s not yet made a remake of a popular movie



Many users are registered on Twitter, not having the slightest idea what kind of service it is, why it was created, how it evolved, and why it is needed by the modern internet addicted geek. Some of these users register accounts for themselves, leave one or two meaningless tweets, or even don’t leave them at all, after which they start to follow everyone in a row or selectively in the hope that they will fall back in response and something will happen. Alas, a miracle happens rarely. Others deliberately deny Twitter, even without aiming to understand it (thank you in advance for their “minus”;) The purpose of this post is to shed light on Twitter for some as well as others, collecting the most significant facts about this revolutionary service and presenting them in accessible form. I hope someone will be useful and interesting.

So:
  1. Twitter ( Twitter ) is a microblogging platform, with the advent of which in 2006, in fact, this term appeared. “Micro” in Twitter format - means the limit of one message is 140 characters.
  2. Some blame Twitter for not only writing, but also thinking, limited to 140 characters. I believe that Twitter makes you think about how to effectively put the idea in 140 characters, and this is a good exercise for the brain. Although, perhaps, if Chekhov had used Twitter, he would not have written that “Brevity is the sister of talent” :)
  3. The name of the service comes from the English word “twit” “twitter” (thanks to Mithgol for the amendment), meaning chirping or tweeting. That is why the twitter symbol is a bird.
  4. Initially, the service was conceived as a quick way to tell everyone the answer to the question “What are you doing now?” (What are you doing?), And this is how until November 2009 the form was titled in the Twitter web interface for entering messages (tweets). Now it is called “What's happening?” (What's happening?), In my opinion, to the maximum, reflecting the evolution of Twitter’s purpose over the years.
  5. The founders of twitter are Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey. And only the latter has a higher education, and the rest have dropped out of their colleges. Perhaps that is why Dorsey became the general director of Twitter;)
  6. The idea of ​​the emergence of twitter, according to the revelations of one of its founders, Jack Dorsey, was finally formed in his process of using LiveJournal.
  7. Twitter is a clear representative of the new direction in the evolution of the Internet Real-Time Web, which appeared because of the desire and desire of users to receive and massively share information in real time. It was the desire of users to be the first to convey to the widest possible audience some news or news became one of the foundations of the explosive growth of Twitter.
  8. Now Twitter is used for many purposes, first of all, of course, for the initial - communication, as well as the fastest possible receipt of information and answers to questions of concern. As a result, journalists and electronic media, corporate PR people and, unfortunately, spammers (mass followers) are tweeting on Twitter. But it’s quite easy to fight the last (Block & Report for spam :)
  9. NASA astronauts from space, the creators of the LHC out of the ground, angry passengers from airports, ordinary people from baths , universities and various events write to twitter.
  10. The native twitter web interface is as simple as possible, which is why twitter was originally easy and accessible to most not very advanced internet users. At the same time, thanks to the API, there are many third-party twitter clients for the most popular platforms that can satisfy even the most demanding geeks. In my opinion, the combination of these two factors also contributed to the growing popularity of Twitter, both among the first and second.
  11. Despite the fact that in 2007, Twitter was available only 98% of the time (for a total of “lying” for about 6 days), and even now it is sometimes lying down, “the mice cried, injected, but continued to eat the cactus” users forgave him and continued, continue and, most likely, will continue to use Twitter because of its uniqueness and revolutionism. A rare example of when downtime does not cause a product to be rejected by consumers.
  12. Currently, the audience of Twitter is 75 million people, while in May 2008 it was only about 1 million. At the same time, the number of active users of Twitter is no more than 20%, i.e. about 15 million people. According to Yandex, as of October 2009, there were more than 76,000 Russian-speaking Twitter users. According to comScore, the volume of traffic generated by twitter last year grew by 700% compared with 2008.
  13. Social connections on Twitter are built on the principle of "those you follow" (following) and "those who follow you" (follower). The tweets are first displayed in your feed, and your tweets, respectively, are displayed in the feed of your followers.
  14. Recently, custom lists have been added to Twitter, the idea and functionality of which were borrowed from previously existing twitter clients. This makes it possible for Twitter users to organize users according to their interests, social characteristics, personal preferences, and simply “from scratch” to make it more convenient to read the tape and track tweets.
  15. For the designation of Twitter users in front of the nickname, the good old dog @ is added. Each tweet at the beginning contains the nickname of its author with reference to the profile. It is safe to say that Twitter gave a second life to the “dog” and brought a kind of novelty to a favorite symbol of many.
  16. In addition to lists, the conditional innovation on Twitter was the retweet function that users themselves invented before and successfully used it for a long time, adding RT in front of the author's nickname, to reprint favorite tweets or spread information on request (RT plz!)
  17. More Twitter users came up with hashtags designed to improve the organization of tweets on specific topics and simplify their search. The most popular hashtag in 2009 was # musicmonday , which was used in tweets with the name and links to your favorite tweetter music on Mondays.
  18. New user syntax on Twitter are steel and slash tags .
  19. The most discussed information on Twitter forms trends . In the default web-based twitter interface, there are 10 most discussed trends at the moment. Recently, Local Trends appeared on Twitter, i.e. opportunity to choose the geography of the display of trends, but so far in the list of available countries neither Russia nor Ukraine, unfortunately, no.
  20. Separate attention should be paid to the fact that all the mentioned innovations in the native Twitter web interface did not appear immediately for all users, but gradually among certain groups. Thereby, Twitter developers tried to avoid possible panic / euphoria and collect / process feedbacks.
  21. One of the most popular twitter in the world is practically my namesake actor Ashton Kutcher (@ aplusk ), he has almost 4.5 million followers. He probably owes his popularity to this outdoor ad ;) Also recently Bill Gates himself came to twitter (@ billgates ), who set a kind of record , gaining 158 thousand followers in just 14 hours.
  22. You can search for new interesting users on Twitter in various ways: through third-party directories with headings according to interests, working through the API; watch those who follow you and in the case of interest - to respond to them in return; use the internal search on Twitter to identify those who write on the necessary and interesting topics for you, as well as using the already mentioned hashtags for the same purpose; view contacts and public lists of other users, etc.
  23. Even Friday twitter users recommend other users to their followers using the hashtags # FF , # FollowFriday , # ru_ff , # ua_ff and # sledui .
  24. By the way, it is the affordable API and, as a result, the presence of a wide variety of third-party services and the already mentioned clients have contributed well to the popularity of Twitter.
  25. One of the most popular services on Twitter, of course, can be called abbreviations. The most popular bit.ly abbreviation is built into many twitter clients by default. The popularity of such services and Twitter itself has led to the fact that Google recently launched its own link reduction service goo.gl , which is currently available, unfortunately, only from the Google Toolbar.
  26. Although Twitter is the default and allows you to post only text messages, nevertheless, users actively share in it links to videos and images hosted on other services. This led to the emergence of special photo and video hosting for Twitter, for example, Twitpic and Yfrog .
  27. “Tell me who you follow, and I will tell you who you are” - this is how you can paraphrase a famous expression. According to the followings and public lists of Twitter users, conclusions can be drawn about their preferences, interests and needs. Indiscriminate following, as well as indiscriminate communication, leads to hardly predictable consequences;)
  28. Very often, Twitter is used to maintain "fake" accounts on behalf of well-known people or companies, with a view to their resale. A striking example of this is the recent scandal with famous Ukrainian politicians. That is why Twitter introduced the Verified Account function, which confirms the authenticity of the identity of its owner. So, when the next time you follow the next Yuliatimoshenko, take a look at whether she has Verified Account;)
  29. Targeted traffic, attracted to the site via Twitter, has a fairly good quality. For example, thanks to the corporate twi-account of our startup @ prokatvsego , users who come to the site browse on average more pages than visitors from other sources, and also spend more time on the site and have a smaller bounce rate, i.e. bounce rate.
  30. In addition, Twitter transmits PageRank and links to sites from it are taken into account by Google when generating the issue, as representatives of this search giant recently admitted.
  31. Also, the presence on Twitter increases awareness and credibility of the brand, which is actively used by leading marketers.
  32. Now the presence of a company account or a startup on Twitter is not only a trend, but also a means to protect against cybersquatters who occupy well-known and not only names with the already mentioned goals.
  33. Until 2009, Twitter was not profitable and avoided active monetization. Only in the middle of last year a minimal advertisement appeared on Twitter. However, last year the project received its first profit. The main source of Twitter revenue in 2009 is a deal with Microsoft / Google, as well as revenues from telecommunications companies through SMS integration.
  34. At various times, according to partially confirmed information (I mean the same rumors), Twitter was attempted to be bought by Google (presumably for $ 250 million), Facebook (for 500 million with its own shares) and Apple (for about 700 million).
  35. Unable to buy Twitter, Google entered into a battle with Microsoft for the right to be the exclusive search partner for twitter and index tweets in real time. As a result, tweets have already appeared in the search results of the US Google and they are updated in real time. Also, there is beta testing of Bing issuance with Twitter, which is available so far, unfortunately, only for users from the United States and pretending to be them.
  36. But Facebook, having missed a deal with Twitter, went the other way and launched its own Facebook Lite service, designed to compete with Twitter.
  37. Now the market value of Twitter is rumored to be close to 1 billion of those same dollars. 55 million venture capital funds have already been invested in Twitter.
  38. The success of Twitter spawned a lot of twitter-like clones, but none of them have so far been able to get close to the original.
  39. I (@ vanocomua ) became a Twitter user in early 2009 during the so-called “second wave” and for the time being I am not going to drop it. And you?

Glossary:

Information sources:

For dessert, an old long-forgotten pixar cartoon "on the topic";)


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By the way, this topic was originally published in my blog .

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/83297/

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