Understanding Twitter
Born in 2006, Twitter is a social networking cum online news service which enables its users to share content in bursts of 140 characters. Over the years, it has evolved like any other successful thing on the Internet and added and/or removed features. Our aim in this chapter is to understand different aspects of this service and use them to draw different insights or solve business problems.
Tip
Twitter was the brainchild of Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. It started as the SMS of the Internet with very simple ideas. You can read the interesting story of its inception here: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/twitter-creator.html
As discussed in the previous chapter, social networks are far reaching and dynamic. Twitter allows users to share information using text, images, videos, GIFs, links, hash tags, handles and so on from a variety...