Twitter

Twitter is a microblogging and social networking website based in the United States that allows users to publish and interact with messages known as "tweets." Registered users have the ability to publish, like, and retweet tweets, while unregistered users can only view tweets that are made accessible to the public. Users may connect with Twitter via a web browser or mobile frontend software, or they can communicate with Twitter programmatically through its APIs. Prior to April 2020, services could only be accessed via SMS. A company headquartered in San Francisco, California that has more than 25 offices across the globe provides the service. Twitter, Inc. is responsible for providing the service. Tweets were previously limited to 140 characters, but the limit were increased to 280 characters for languages other than Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in November 2017. For the most part, audio and video tweets are still restricted to 140 seconds in length.

Founded in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams with the help of others, Twitter became live in July of the same year. By 2012, the site had more than 100 million users who sent 340 million tweets each day, and it processed an average of 1.6 billion search requests per day, according to Twitter. It was one of the top ten most visited websites in the world in 2013, and has been referred to as "the SMS of the Internet." Twitter has more than 330 million monthly active users as of the first quarter of 2019. In light of the fact that the overwhelming majority of tweets are produced by a tiny percentage of users, Twitter is classified as a some-to-many microblogging service.