Twitter

Twitter is a social networking site, which can also function as a mini blog. Twitter allows its users to send little messagers called tweets. Tweets consist of no more than 140 characters and can be ready by the public or they can be set to private. Tweets can either be sent by the use of a comoputer or they can be sent by mobile devices.

History
Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone in 2006. Dorsey got the idea for Twitter back in 2000 when he wanted to create a website who's primary use would be for broadcasting live status updates. Dorsey met Stone and the two built a Twitter prototype in two weeks, and pitched the concept to Odeo, an audio and video podcast website company, which bought into the idea.

Name
The original name for the site was "Status". Dorsey said that he wanted a name that would capture the feeling of your friends' phones buzzing in their pockets, so he renamed it "Twitch". Feeling that this was still not a good enough name, Dorsey looked in a dictionary for words close to twitch and came across the word "twitter". Dorsey said, "The definition was "a short burst of inconsequential information," and chirps from birds." And that's exactly what the product was." Even though they had the product name, Twitter, someone already owned Twitter.com, so the site operated under the name Twttr.com.

Privacy & Security Issues
Twitter, like a lot of social networking sites has had its share of privacy issues.

One such issue occurred on January 5, 2009 when a Twitter administrator's account was hacked. The hacker then gained access to 33 major twitter accounts, one of them being then President-elect, Barack Obama.

Another instance of security issues occurred in May 2010, when a bug was found in the system which allowed users to make someone follow them. Twitter later fixed the problem and assured people that their private tweets were not exposed.

Twitter's privacy and security issues culminated into charges being brought against them by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). This was the FTC's first time taking action against a social networking site for privacy issues. The charges were settled on June 24,2010. The settlement forces Twitter to take steps to protect all users' data.