Twitter

By Hurma Khan Jul 1st, 2012 ( No Comment )

In the world of social networking, Twitter is another channel for micro-blogging. It enables its users to send and read instant text-based tweets of up to 140 characters. These tweets are also known as “SMS of internet”.

Twitter was launched in March, 2006 and in its 6 years of journey it has gained worldwide popularity and reached a number of 500 million active users. As far as the content and usage is concerned, about 52% of its usage is done for gossiping and as spam, 38% is for conversational purpose however, 4% of its usage is served for news and new-media.

The thing that has become the characteristic feature of twitter is the logo of a bird that suits best with its name. Twitter has been redesigned thrice a time. Its latest logo that has been the signature or symbol for twitter, has revised in June, 2012.

Another interesting feature is the “Trending topic”, which is defined as any phrase or topic that becomes the talk of the town for the society or the world such as, twitter did play its role as an important factor during “Arab spring” (a revolutionary wave of protest occurred in Middle East From December 2010 – June, 2011) and any topic or event promoted by the people themselves to talk about can also be the trending topic that gains greater rate to tag.

The users who subscribe other users to get their tweets, this is known as ‘Following’ and the subscribers are known as ‘Followers’.

With its increasing trend, Twitter has changed its focus and started emphasizing largely on news and information-network strategy in November 2009 by changing the question asked to users for status updates from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?. This has been been done to introduce a concept of wire-like news service which is good as in this way its content is and will largely be shared for news and information purpose.