Meaning of twitter (what is it, concept and definition)

What is Twitter:

Twitter is the name of a microblogging platform that allows you to communicate and share content in real time from anywhere in the world through the internet . It is considered by many as one of the most popular social networks in the world, along with Facebook.

The word twitter , from English, is a verb that means 'to chirp' or 'twitter', which is the sound that birds make. Hence, for example, that its logo has a bird as an image and that the network is popularly known as "the bird network".

Twitter was created in March 2006 and launched in the Spanish-speaking market in November 2009. Currently, it has more than 500 million users worldwide.

Twitter is used to spread news and information, stay informed of local or global events, to communicate with other users, debate, argue, exchange points of view, or simply to share content of interest.

One of the main features of Twitter is immediacy: it allows users to be in contact from anywhere in the world in real time.

However, each tweet or publication can only contain 140 characters, which is another of Twitter's peculiarities: its brevity.

To tweet, users can do it from their accounts through the service's website or through specialized applications installed on their smartphones.

On the other hand, Twitter works differently from traditional social networks: Twitter has followers and each user in turn follows other accounts. Thus, a user only accesses in his timeline or wall the publications of the accounts he follows, while his messages will only be seen by his followers.

All messages are public by default in Twitter, however, there is the possibility of making a privacy setting to protect the publications from the eyes of others.

In recent years, Twitter has been an extremely powerful tool to confront dictatorships and fight for freedom, as demonstrated by the political movements of the so-called "Arab Spring", in which much information was able to circulate precisely thanks to social networks such as Twitter..

Twitter Terms

• Tweet ( tweet ): message posted. It can only have a maximum of 140 characters. Retuit ( retweet ): these are messages forwarded by users other than their original author. RT is abbreviated. Direct Message (direct message) are messages sent privately between users. DM is abbreviated. Tag ( hashtag ): Allows users to indicate the specific topic or topics. The labels are preceded by a pound sign or numeral (#). Trends of the moment ( trending topic ): they are the most tweeted topics of the moment by a community. They can be both local and global.