9781422287231 Twitter®: How Jack Dorsey Changed the Way We Communicate

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TWITTER

McCain, used Twitter to keep in touch with their supporters while cam- paigning. And later, they used another invention of Jack Dorsey: Square. THE MANY USES OF TWITTER In 2009, a market research company did a study to figure out exactly how people were using Twitter. The research found that 40 percent of tweets were about “pointless babble.” Another 38 percent were con- versational tweets between users. Only 4 percent of posts were about news, with another 4 percent being taken up by spam posts. Six percent of posts involved self-promotion , while nine percent of tweets were retweeted to pass along information. Expanding websites are prone to outages, or periods of time where the website is simply overloaded with users and cannot function properly, causing the website to crash. Twitter’s rapid growth from 2007 to 2008 led to many of these outages, and the service has experienced periodic outages ever since. Fortunately, these outages only occur a few times a year, and they are usually due to an unusual spike in activity. Regular maintenance is performed to expand Twitter’s servers as the website con- tinues to grow. One of the ways people use Twitter is to discuss current events. This is a great way to pass on information long before others can catch it on the news or any other social media website. The servers that host Twitter undergo more strain during a very popular event, such as a large sports game or media award show. These events can temporarily shut the serv- ers down for minutes or even hours. As Twitter grew on an international level, people were using the ser- vice to share their experiences with users from across the world. In 2009, many Iranian people were using Twitter to communicate with each other about ongoing protests in the country. Twitter had planned to have a scheduled maintenance during this time, but a United States State De- partment spokesperson asked Twitter to delay the maintenance so that people in Iran could communicate—and Twitter agreed!