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Introduc ing Twi t ter
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Thanks to Twitter, the whole world is now linked together in one large
network. All users have to do is type a short 140 character tweet! “Now
I can see the entire world, and how they’re thinking, and how they’re
feeling, and what they’re doing, and what they care about, and where
they’re going,” Jack Dorsey said in an interview. Twitter became exactly
what he hoped it would be.
Although Twitter has many possible uses, most users use it as a mi-
croblogging service. In other words, they post small snippets about their
day on Twitter for their followers to see. They might talk about how they
are feeling about an upcoming test, what they are eating at the moment,
or what movie they plan to see later on tonight. This is exactly how Jack
envisioned the average person would use Twitter when he created Twitter
in the first place.
Jack was once asked about his proudest moment regarding the inven-
tion of Twitter. He said, “I am most proud of how quickly people came
to it and used it in a million different ways.” People are finding different
ways to use Twitter each day.
USERS SHAPE THE FUTURE
Twitter users have greatly defined how Twitter is used, but they have also
inspired new functionality within the website. For example, users began
Make Connections: Retweeting
One of the ways users can pass along information is by retweeting
someone else’s tweet. At first, there was no official way to differen-
tiate a unique tweet from a retweet, so users would prefix a repost
with the short code: rt. Twitter eventually added in the functionality
to differentiate between unique and reposted tweets so that users
did not have to mark retweets themselves.