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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!