How Twitter Works

cases recently it's been sort of how Twitter doesn't work? Right? There is there's a certain graphic that pops up when Twitter is out of service. And I just got to hear what the name of it was the other day, Chris, come on share with us. It's the fail whale. Is the fail whale. It's it's cheerful looking whale that tells you that sorry, Twitter is not working just now. Um,

recently it's gotten a little bit better there. There haven't been as many crashes, and we think that that might have something to do with an a recent influx of cash in the Twitter coffers. That's right. In May they received fifteen million dollars in venture capital funding. Um, and that increases there they're total to about twenty millions, so

that gives them a lot more capacity. And the reason this is an issue is because people are starting to take to these microblogs, which are basically a hundred and sixty characters. Yeah. Yeah, and so basically you have to summarize, you know, what you're saying in a very very short time. And it gives people an opportunity to blurt out a quick thought. Um. And it's very popular. It's taken off so much that Twitter has been showing the fail whale to many of us now right right, and and it

spans beyond just the internet. Uh. Twitter interfaces with cell phones. It's using SMS technology, the short messaging service where you you send these short messages. It's just like sending a text message to someone else, except this case you're sending a text message to a network of people. So when a lot of people are sending lots of text messages to large networks, that puts a lot of strain on

the system. But um, it's it's another important thing to note that the venture capital that's going into Twitter is really the main source. In fact, the really the only source of significant revenue that Twitter is. It's not even really generating revenue, it's just coming in on investments because Twitter is very proud of the fact that they don't

have a business plan. Well, you know, there are a lot of competitors out there that are taking advantage of the frequent fail whales, like um um Pounds, which is uh something created by a number of people, including one of the founders of dig Kevin Rose right right, um Clerk, which is created by a group of people call who call themselves the A Team. Um Identica, which is a brand new version from Canada which is completely open sourced.

Um you know, and I can't I can't figure out whether the j is pronounced ji q or hi q. But they were gobbled up by Google right getting ready to run themselves in the Google App Engine, and they haven't released their new version. But all these people are sort of waiting in line to be the next Twitter if Twitter manages to uh if they if they collapse

under the weight of all the popularity. And it's actually interesting some of the some of the biggest Twitter cheerleaders have kind of moved on to talking about other services after seeing the fail whale one too many times. So this is definitely a real concern for Twitter. Um it's also showing us that that this microblog thing, it doesn't

look like it's going away. It's really really popular. And it kind of surprised me because the first time I thought about it was like, why would I want to know when my friends going out to shop for new shoes? But people are using it for lots of things, to to organize impromptu gatherings like Hey, who wants to go see a movie tonight? Or or even following the news. There are many news organizations that have Twitter feeds now and they give breaking news on you You hear about

breaking news before it hits any websites. Oh sure, Well, I mean that gives you know, added venues for the citizen journalists as they call them, to uh, you know, to tweet there happened to be out on the on the sidewalk while something happens, and someone can post it to Twitter, and the news travels very quickly, faster than the media outlets can broadcast it. At the speed of life.

You might say. As a matter of fact, I subscribe on my Twitter account to a number of journalists and photographers who happened to be out and when they see something, they'll they'll post something to their Twitter and they can even get you out of jail. Uh. James carl Buck who was a grad student in Egypt, he got arrested

while photograph photographing an anti government demonstration. He tweet tweeted the word arrested and sent it out to his followers, and their response meant that he was freed shortly thereafter. So it's definitely gots uses um for listeners out there who are curious. I have a Twitter account. If you want to follow me, it's Twitter dot com slash John Strickland that's j O N S t R I c K L A n D. And of course, if you

how stuff Works itself has a Twitter account. If you follow how stuff Works underscore um, that's the official stuff works Twitter. So I guess we'll have to tweet you guys later in the meantime. If you want to learn more, you can always read how Twitter Works at the website how stuff works dot com. Thanks a lot for listening for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com? Let us know what

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