Twitter: What are you doing?
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, the Twitter website, or an application such as Twitterrific. Twitter was founded in October 2006 by San Francisco start-up company Obvious Corp.
Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and also instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, or through an application. For SMS, currently three gateway numbers are available: short codes for the USA and Canada and a UK number for international use. While the Twitter service is free, posting and receiving updates via SMS may incur charges from the wireless carrier.
Twitter began as a research and development project inside of Odeo, Inc. by Noah Glass and Jack Dorsey, and debuted in March 2006. The Twitter team won the 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category. They gave the following playful acceptance speech: "We'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"
Twitter is experiencing numerous challenges related to its growing user base. The Wall Street Journal wrote, "These social-networking services elicit mixed feelings in the technology-savvy people who have been their early adopters. Fans say they are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel 'too' connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they're having for dinner."
Prominent Twitter users include U.S. presidential candidates John Edwards and Barack Obama, podtech.net blogger Robert Scoble, Xbox blogger Larry Hryb, and tech podcasters Leo Laporte and Veronica Belmont (as well as many others). On April 4, 2007, Laporte left Twitter for Jaiku due to trademark problems with his TWiT trademark.
The first Twitter security vulnerability was reported on April 7, 2007 by Nitesh Dhanjani. The problem was due to Twitter using the SMS message originator as the authentication of the users account. Nitesh used fakemytext.com to spoof a SMS message, Twitter then posted the message on the victims page. This vulnerability can only be used if the victims phone number is known.