Profile of the company and its shareholders
The company founded in July 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams has raised $ 35 million from several investors, mostly from venture capital. The new capital is added to the $ 5 million he raised in 2006 or the 15 million in July 2007 that rises to $ 55 million funds received since its founding.
Some of the founding institutions of the company and was led by Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners, but has also reunited with Spark Capital Union, Square Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Digital Garage have been repeated in this new round of funding which will allow address the explosive growth stage of the company.
Twitter started as a research and development within Obvious, LLC, a small start-up of San Francisco during March 2006. The original name of the product was twttr, inspired by Flickr. At first it was used internally by the company until it was officially released to the public in October of that year. The service quickly began to gain currency in March 2007 and won the South by Southwest Web Award in the category of blog.
Jack Dorsey is the father of this web application and current Chairman of the Board of Directors of Twitter, Inc, a company that grew out of Obvious, LLC and the success of Twitter. In early 2008, the Twitter team was composed of 18 people during 2009 have increased its staff by four and still growing.
While Twitter was using for a short time advertising services such as Google AdSense, decided to discard the advertising revenue to get more users, while funded with investments from venture capital firms. In September 2009, Twitter has announced changes to the terms of service, leaving open the possibility of advertising on its service.
Technology
The Twitter web interface is written in Ruby on Rails, and messages are kept in a server running software programmed in Scala and also has an open API for all developers, which is a big plus for those who want Twitter as a service to integrate both in other web applications as desktop and mobile applications. According to Biz Stone Over 50% of our traffic comes through our API. However, due to technical problems and scalability, Twitter may abandon Ruby on Rails as its framework for development to start a new one based on PHP or Java. Evan Williams, however, quickly denied this information in a Tweet that sent the May 1, 2008.
Interface
Steven Berlin Johnson describes the basic mechanics of Twitter as "very simple":
Social networking, Twitter revolves around the principle of the followers. When you choose to follow another Twitter user, that user's tweets appear in reverse chronological order, on the home page of Twitter. If you follow 20 people, you will see a mixture of tweets scroll down the page: Update on breakfast cereal, new links, music recommendations, including reflections on the future of education.
On April 30, 2009, Twitter changed their web interface, adding a search bar and a bar of Topics of the Moment (Trending Topics), which are the most common phrases that actually appear in the messages. "Each public update sent to Twitter from anywhere in the world can be indexed and searchable immediately are posted in real time," said Biz Stone. "With this feature recently launched Twitter has become, unexpectedly, a major discovery engine to find what is happening now."
Although its purpose and doubt the usefulness of Twitter, the increasing number of supporters have demonstrated that Twitter is one of the leaders in the field of microblogging, among other services like Jaiku, which has the support of Google. In 2009, Google decided to release the code for Jaiku, leaving the development in the hands of the open-source.
Among the most common uses are: monitoring of live events, webcasting of talks and presentations to which few people have access, exchange of views during an event in which people attend as an audience or even comment on movies or debates broadcast on television (eg the discussion of Rodriguez and Rajoy in Spain's general elections 2008, closely followed by exchanges of views via Twitter).
Although we also have other extreme cases, where the inhabitants of Edmond, Oklahoma (USA.) Coordinated and gave exact location of the tornado that struck the town on March 31, 2008, through this web application.
Are also beginning to use Twitter to conduct interviews. In English, have given interviews in this format even with John McCain. In Spanish, Diariomedico.com performs 'twitterviews' in English and Castilian since December 2008, subsequently published a summary.