what is Twitter

Twitter

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Twitter, Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	San Francisco, California, United States
Founder	Jack Dorsey Evan Williams Biz Stone
Headquarters	795 Folsom St., Suite 600, San Francisco, CA 94107[1], United States
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Jack Dorsey (Chairman) Dick Costolo (CEO) Evan Williams (Product Strategy) Biz Stone (Creative Director)
Revenue	US $150 million (projected 2010)[2]
Employees	351 (2010)[3]
Slogan	What's happening?
Website	twitter.com
Alexa rank	10 (November 2010[update])[4]
Type of site	mobile social network service, microblogging
Registration	Required
Users	190 million (accounts, not visitors)[5]
Available in	Multilingual English, Spanish, Japanese, German, French, and Italian
Launched	July 15, 2006[6]
Current status	Active
Screenshot[show] Twitter profile

Twitter is a website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., which offers a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery to their friends list. Users may subscribe to other users' tweets—this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers.^[7]
All users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, compatible external applications (such as for smartphones), or by Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries.^[8] While the service is free, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees. The website is based in San Francisco, California. Twitter also has servers and offices in San Antonio, Texas and Boston, Massachusetts.
Since its creation in March 2006 and its launch in July 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained popularity worldwide and currently has more than 175 million users.^[9] It is estimated that Twitter has 190 million users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day.^[10] It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet."^[11]