"Has an idea ever struck in your mind while you were on playground? If you did, how confident were you that your idea will be a definite blockbuster?"
Twitter is a perfect example which blew the whole world. A micro blogging service, has emerged into a new medium of sharing updates instantaneously as a spotlight through recent happenings.Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Doresy, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams and launched in July.When they first created the site they were just for a way to send text messages on their cell phones.
Twitter users follow others or are followed. Unlike on most online social networking sites, such as Facebook or MySpace, the relationship of following and being followed requires no reciprocation. A user can follow any other user, and the user being followed need not follow back. Being a follower on Twitter means that the user receives all the messages (called tweets) from those the user follows. Common practice of responding to a tweet has evolved into well-defined markup culture: RT stands for re-tweet, ’@’ followed by a user identifier address the user, and ’#’ followed by a word represents a hashtag. This well-defined markup vocabulary combined with a strict limit of 140 characters per posting conveniences users with brevity in expression. The re-tweet mechanism empowers users to spread information of their choice beyond the reach of the original tweet’s followers.
Twitter offers an Application Programming Interface (API) that is easy to crawl and collect data. A Twitter user keeps a brief profile about oneself. The public profile includes the full name, the location, a web page, a short biography, and the number of tweets of the user. The people who follow the user and those that the user follows are also listed. Twitter rate-limits 20, 000 requests per hour per white listed IP.
Twitter tracks phrases, words, and hashtags that are most often mentioned and posts them under the title of "trending topics" regularly. A hashtag is a convention among Twitter users to create and follow a thread of discussion by prefixing a word with a ‘#’ character. Ending a tweet without hashtag is called hangtag and its twitter’s version of mic drop. The social bookmarking site Del.icio.us also uses the same hashtag convention. Twitter shows a list of top ten trending topics of the moment on a right sidebar on every user’s homepage by default, unless set otherwise. The API returns the trending topic title, a query string, and the time of the API request. Twitter used the query string to grab all the tweets that mention the trending topic.
Spam tweets have increased in Twitter as the popularity of Twitter is growing as reported in. As spam web page farms undermine the accuracy of page rank and spam keywords inserted in web pages hinder relevant web page extraction, spam tweets add noise and bias in. The Twitter Support Team suspends any user reported to be a spammer. Still unreported spam tweets can creep into our data. In order to remove spam tweets, twitter employ the well-known mechanism of the Firefox add-on, Clean tweets. Clean Tweets filters tweets from users who have been on Twitter for less than a day when presenting Twitter search results to Firefox. It also removes those tweets that contain three or more trending topics.
When you create an account on twitter, everyone’s first tweet is automated. Though twitter didn’t create re-tweet's replies hashtags a mobile app or social add it was evolved by users and developers by the phase of time and it was later supported by twitter. Twitters mobile app has different features than its Web service. On mobile, users can save drafts, while visitors on Web can't save unpublished posts. This social networking site has 288 million monthly active users, but the number of registered accounts is much higher. There are more than 2 billion registered Twitter accounts, according to Twopcharts . The services sees more than 500 million tweets a day now. If you want to know your first ever tweet than you can simply go to First-Tweets.com. Twitter has 3600 employees and most of them are engineers.
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