Twitter

TWITTER

There is no discussion about it. All companies need nowadays the Internet to increase their business. That is the reason why the number of Internet firms has exponentially raised last ten years. Names like Google, Amazon or MSN have settled down in our daily vocabulary and make now part of our lives. Their importance is so high that many no-Internet-based companies buy their servicesto be on the web. This obviously increases their power and popularity and also makes that more and more companies desire to engage with them. The variety of business on the web is huge, from small local newspapers to global bookmarkers can be found. But last three years, a new kind of platform has appeared and quickly gained popularity: the social networks. These platforms can be regional (likeSkyblog in France or Tuenti in Spain) or global (like Facebook or MySpace). The one that will be presented here is Twitter, a free service of microblogging that allow users to post and read short messages. It has become very popular in his short period of existence (14 million users only in US in 2009). This begs the questions, how can this simple based platform become so important? What makes itdifferent from other social networks? And in an economic context, what is the business model of this company? How is it possible that a free service can get such a big capital investment? We will try to answer these questions by showing different aspects of Twitter. First we are going to introduce briefly its history and then describe its actual situation. After that, we will explain itsactivities comparing them with other important social networks. Finally we will present the services it offers in order to clarify this business model and how does it generate value.

As mentioned previously, let’s shortly expose Twitter’s history. How did it start? When? Who is the creator of the platform? All of these questions are important to understand what Twitter is now.
Twitter began as aninvestigation project led by Jack Doresy for the podcasting company Odeo, Inc in March 2006. The idea was to allow users describe via SMS what they were doing at any moment. The original name was twttr, based on Flickr, a picture sharing web site. It was later renamed Twitter and remained like this until the present days. In the beginning, it was used by the Odeo employees, but later in July 2006, itwas launched for public access. In October 2006, Obvious Corporation bought Odeo, including the site twitter.com. Nevertheless, in April 2007 the new company Twitter, Inc was founded, with Jack Doresy as president and with its headquarters in San Francisco, California. The firm started having 18 employees in the beginning of 2008 but it has increased this number by four nowadays.
The platformstarted being used mostly by adults than teenagers, and for professional reasons, more than for leisure. This situation turned almost to the opposite all along the years.
The main reason for this was that some famous personalities started to have a Twitter account and publicly announced they were often updating their profiles. There are many examples of it, but the most important would be theAmerican actor Ashton Kutcher, first person followed by more than one million people on Twitter, the basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, who even wrote on Twitter in the half time of a NBA game or the presenter Oprah Winfrey. All these made a lot of teenagers subscribe on Twitter and also made its popularity rise very quickly.

At this point, there is something that everybody should wonder: how doesTwitter work? What does make it so attractive for people? And what makes it different from other social networks?
Twitter is a platform where people can write short messages, called tweets, no larger than 140 characters. The reason of this number is easy: the idea is based on the SMS, which allow 160 characters. Actually, users can update their accounts from the web page or via SMS. If they...