18 August 2010

Great Minds Tweet, Follow Some!

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., that enables its users to send and read other user’s messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery to their friends list. Users may subscribe to other author tweets—this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers. As of late 2009, users can follow lists of authors instead of following individual authors. All users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, compatible external applications (such as, for smart-phones), or by Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries. While the service is free, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees. The website is based out in San Bruno, California near San Francisco (where the website was first based). Twitter also has servers and offices in San Antonio, Texas and Boston, Massachusetts.

Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide and currently has more than 100 million users worldwide. It is sometimes described as the “SMS of the Internet.” The use of Twitter’s application programming interface (API) for sending and receiving SMS from other applications often dominates the direct use of Twitter.
A social network service focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, e.g., who share interests and/or activities. A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web based and provide means for users to interact over the internet, such as e-mail and instant messaging. Although online community services are sometimes considered as a social network service in a broader sense, social network service usually means an individual-centered service whereas online community services are group-centered. Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks.

The main types of social networking services are those which contain category places Face-book, Twitter widely used worldwide; My-space and Linked-In being the most widely used in North America. There have been some attempts to standardize these services to avoid the need to duplicate entries of friends and interests. Although some of the largest social networks were founded on the notion of digitizing real world connections, many networks focus on categories from books and music to non-profit business to motherhood as ways to provide both services and community to individuals with shared interests.

One of the real benefits to an application like twitter is it also allows individuals to connect to those other wise out of reach like President Obama and The Dali lama or perhaps Oprah in real time and realize that these power players ponder and hypothesize the same way that you and I do. Tweeting will help certain individuals realize that even the Diane Sawyers of the world have human moments and so while these social applications can be argued are contributing to the notion that people are becoming more and more dependent on technology even for our human interaction. I being an optimist chose to see the positive with an application like twitter which connects it’s users to some of the great thinkers of today. So follow someone that you admire and aspire to emulate on twitter you just might learn something new today while giving you your own personal soap box to sound off from your keyboard.

Tweet Away my friends, it does a mind good!

Nexonta Technologies Inc