Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets."

About 10% of acounts are deemed to be fake.

Use at the Commission

 * European Union, Take part, Twitter accounts

History

 * 2006: Service launched on March 21, 2006
 * Originally named as TWTR, the service was launched by Odeo as a service to send and receive SMS (why 140 charecters limit).


 * 2007: comes hashtag
 * Chris Mesina, asked in his tweet https://twitter.com/chrismessina/status/223115412 "how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups?".


 * 2008: NASA used Twitter to announced landing of Phoenix on Mars https://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix/status/839088619 (95 retweets).


 * 2009: 3rd widest social network
 * https://twitter.com/jkrums/status/1121915133 Janis Krums tweeted the plain landed on Hudson river.


 * 2010: images integrated and "promoted tweets" added

Tools

 * http://www.tweetstats.com/ - Tweets per hour, Tweets per month, Tweet timeline, Reply report
 * http://www.tweetails.com/ - Tweets reports, Favourite words, Most mentioned users, Intelligence rating
 * http://twitaholic.com/ - basic report on ranking, no Tweets and follower
 * http://www.socialbakers.com/

Read also

 * 10 Surprising New Twitter Stats to Help You Reach More Followers http://blog.bufferapp.com/10-new-twitter-stats-twitter-statistics-to-help-you-reach-your-followers
 * The Linguistics of ReTweets http://danzarrella.com/retweet-linguistics.html
 * The 20 Least ReTweetable Words http://danzarrella.com/the-20-least-retweetable-words.html
 * http://blog.bufferapp.com/optimal-best-time-to-tweet-followerwonk-buffer