Friday 23 March 2012

Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking service and micro blogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets". It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 300 million users as of 2011, and in mid February 2012 Twitter had reached an estimation of over 500million users. In 2011 reports suggested that the company generated over 300 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. Twitter has been described as "the SMS of the Internet”.

Twitter is without a doubt the best and quickest way to share and discover what is happening right now. Twenty-seven minutes before mainstream media broke the news of Whitney Houston’s death on Saturday night, the story was on Twitter. A tweet— sent at 4:57 p.m. PT from the Associated Press that confirmed Houston’s death which was retweeted more than 10,000 times. However, the first tweet to reveal the news was sent at 4:30 p.m. PT. The tragic news of Houston’s death spread fast on Twitter. In fact, about 2.5 million tweets and retweets occurred in the first hour, amounting to more than 1,000 tweets a second.

This isn’t the first time news a large-scale death announcement was first reported on Twitter. A computer programmer in Pakistan inadvertently live-tweeted the military raid on the Osama bin Laden compound. “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1 a.m. (is a rare event). His message later received global media attention following the news of bin Laden’s death.
A new Twitter record was set in 2011 during the MTV VMA after Beyonce announced her baby news the singer kicked off her performance of "Love on Top" by telling the audience, "I want you to feel the love that's growing inside me." After the song, she unbuttoned her coat and rubbed her five-month baby bump. Beyonce's announcement set off a tweeting frenzy that saw 8,868 tweets per second that’s the most tweets per second ever recorded for a single event.

Twitter is a multi-million dollar company which everyone has seemed to jump on the band wagon. Tv broadcasters like Channel 4 now hashtag their Tv shows at the bottom of the screen so people can tweet about them and then they will gain a rise in popularity. News Broadcasters also now have twitter so they can rise in popularity but also people then can follow them and gain insights into journalism and broadcasting. Celebrities have been the main reason why Twitters population has increased, as many people like celebrities and are interested in their gossip and it’s the quickest way to entertain their gossip hungry minds is by following them on Twitter.

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