Twitter

 

Twitter, a site intended to allow its users to create short messages about their daily ramblings was launched in July of 2006. Twitter's creator, Jack Dorsey, along with Biz Stone, Noah Glass and Evan Williams, envisioned a site similar to SMS (short message service), where people would communicate using 140 characters or less. As of now, Twitter receives well over 100 million tweets per day. Along with twitter being used as a personal microblog, it's also used as a form of communication to discuss social topics, media, current and world events. Through the site's trending topics and hashtag feature, users can collectively talk about those specific topics that became popular.

The image to the right shows a sketch of Twitter by its creator as well as the first tweet.

 

Twitter has become one of the most used sites to talk about events in real time. Events such as the 2012 political election has been discussed widely on twitter. During the debates, over 100,000 tweets per minute were sent during the more provoking moments. The election had such a profound effect on twitter and social media as a whole. Below is a picture of President Obama's tweet after his re-election victory that became the most retweeted tweet ever.