Twitter is a free social networking (Social network service) and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 character (Character (computing))s displayed on the authors profile page and delivered to the authors subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) (SMS) or external applications. While the service itself costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider (Telecommunications Service Provider) fees.

The 140-character limit on message length was initially set for compatibility with SMS messaging, and has brought to the web the kind of shorthand notation and slang (internet slang) commonly used in SMS messages. The 140 character limit has also spurred the usage of URL shortening services such as tinyurl, bit.ly and tr.im, and content hosting services, such as Twitpic and NotePub to accommodate multimedia content and text longer than 140 characters.

Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet" since the use of Twitters application programming interface for sending and receiving short text messages (Short message service) by other applications often eclipses the direct use of Twitter.

quoteWhat we have to do is deliver to people the best and freshest most relevant information possible. We think of Twitter as its not a social network, but its an information network. It tells people what they care about as it is happening in the world.Evan Williams

Twitter emphasized their news and information network strategy in November 2009 by changing the question it asks users for status updates from "What are you doing?" to "Whats happening?". Twitter is ranked as one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide by Alexas (Alexa Internet) web traffic analysis. Although estimates of the number of daily users vary because the company does not release the number of active accounts, a February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranked Twitter as the third most used social network based on their count of 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits. In March 2009, a Nielsen.com (Nielsen Company) blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing site in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had a monthly growth of 1,382 percent, Zimbio of 240 percent, followed by Facebook with an increase of 228 percent. However, only 40 percent of Twitters users are retained.