Last month, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest growing site on internet for February 2009. Twitter had a growth of 1382%, whereas Zimbio which is on second place had a growth of 240%, followed by Facebook with a growth of 228%. It is actually one of the first micro-blogging sites on internet. It enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them.
Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or applications such as Tweetie, Twitterrific, Twitterfon, TweetDeck and feedalizr. The service is free to use over the Internet, but using SMS is not free as it involves some charge from the phone service provider. Now a days, it has become the “SMS of Internet”, as it provides the functionality (via its application programming interfaces) for other desktop and web-based applications to send and receive short text messages.
See this video which explains Twitter in simple English ::