Twitter

The word 'Twitter' used to be synonimous of a social network in which people expressed their thoughts and topics changed were diverse within a day - and still is synonimous of these. But nowadays, Twitter is also a hotbed of controversy in which dividing sides change constantly. This should not scare us, since we will give it an educational use but we must know to what reality we are facing so we are not caught off guard!

With the reality settled down, now we are going to briefly know what is Twitter, it's advantages and disagvantages, its educational functions or focuses and how to use it as a begginer!

What is Twitter?

Let's begging with some history, so we will have a brief context!

Twitter origins: CEO of twttr

CEO means Chief Executive officer, and in terms of Twitter, Jack Dorsey (@jack on Twitter) is the mastermind behind the blue bird social page. We are not going to write this man's biography but we will let you know that as other famous technology geniuses, he never finished college and started programming when he was at high school - aged 15, created a dispatch software that some taxi companies still use! - and in 2000 Dorsey built a simple prototype that let him update his friends on his life via BlackBerry and email messaging! This was one of the base ideas to work out Twitter, since in 2006 he had an idea of creating a site in which you can communicate via SMS, in which groups of friends could keep tabs on what each other were doing based on their status updates. Not texting at all but similar.

@jack got a job at the podcasting company called Odeo, where he met his future Twitter cofounders, Evan Williamns (@ ev) and Biz Stone (@biz). During a brainstorming session, Dorsey came up with this idea previously explained, and both cofounder gave him a go, so he kept working on this idea. Following an old trend to gain domain-advantage, they dropped vowels from the name, creating 'twttr' which slowly turned into world know 'Twitter', both suggestions by software developer Noah Glass (@noah).

In order, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams, taking home the prize in the blogging category at SXSW in 2007

First tweet, by @jack, was on March 21st, 2006, was the origin of the members racking up hundreds of dollars in their phone bills during Twitter's testing in Odeo. After Odeo's sinking due to Apple's releasing their own podcasting platform, the founders decided to buy their company from their investors, acquiring Twitter's rights.

Tweet, tweet, explosion!

In 2007 Twitter achieved its cusp, or at least, the starting point of it. During the South By Southwest Interactive conference, more than 60,000 tweets were sent per day at the event. The Twitter team had a huge presence at the event and took advantage of the viral nature of the conference and its attendees.Twitter's user base grew at astounding rates and quite frequently the service would be over capacity.

When over capacity happened, a whale being lifted by eight birds appeared in the users' window, symbolizing Twitter was working on the problem, willing to solve it soon.

Known as the 'Fail Whale', was designed by artist Yiying Lu (@YiyingLu).

Twitter is famous for its 140 characters limit in each tweet sent. This comes because of its origin as SMS-based, but as Twitter became a website, this was one aspect of braning rather of utility. After years of using 140 characters, users asked for making it quite bigger and as the prayers were heard, in 2017 they increased the tweet limit to 280 characters over minor protestations. Even though, the company explained most tweets have no more than 50 characters, and that when an user ran out of space, he just sent another tweet (sometimes continued by a '+' symbol at the end of the first tweet and at the beggining of the next one).

The present of Twitter.

As happens with most things exposed to the public - and specially to the whole world - users changed the ways of using the service, innovating.

Initially, users had no way of replying to one another on Twitter. Some users would include an @ symbol before a username to identify another user within a Tweet. This became such a prevalent way to acknowledge another user that the Twitter team added the functionality natively to the Twitter platform. The same thing happened with hashtags, which are now an integral part of the Twitter ecosystem.

This user-driven functionality is also the source of retweets. Users wanted a way to re-post a message from a Twitter user while including credit to the user who originally tweeted it. Users started to add RT before sending the message, signaling to their followers that the following tweet was a report. In August 2010, this functionality was officially added to the platform.

Now we know a little bit of Twitter and how, as happened with Facebook, the users are the ones with the last word. Summing up, Twitter is a 'microblogging' system that allows you to send and receive short posts called tweets. Tweets can be up to 280 characters long and can include links to relevant websites and resources.

Twitter users follow other users. If you follow someone you can see their tweets in your twitter 'timeline'. You can choose to follow people and organisations with similar academic and personal interests to you.

You can create your own tweets or you can retweet information that has been tweeted by others. Retweeting means that information can be shared quickly and efficiently with a large number of people.

Some advantages and disadvantages...

Twitter is a wonderful app if you know how to use it. Teachers, students, and parents can benefit greatly of the advantages offered by using Twitter in education. The short tweets can be used to inform students about any changes and to collaboratively work as a great team.

As some benefits, its limited character messages allows you to sum up what you want to say, so students or followers can see very synthesized the message you want to send; this leads to its fast notification and spread! The followers will get a notification of each tweet so they won't miss anything!

It's also clever to use the famous re-tweets to let your students/ followers know interesting things or let hints of your next class! You can even hand them some resources. Teachers, parents and everyone can use it to be updated with their students or by following other education accounts, so other people can share with you their knowledge and learn together. If you get creative, you can create mini contests, for example, for your Literature class by asking them to create a micro-story and the one with most re-tweets or favs is the winner...

These advantages can be applied to any aspect; interested in arts? Almost every artist has a Twitter account where they usually post more than in other social networks! Do you have a small bussiness? Twitter can help you reach the younger or those who are far with 280 characters and a click.

Disadvantages are quite similar to Facebook's ones - and to any social network. The privacy settings are a core aspect, so it's important to configure them correctly, so you can configure 'Protect my Tweets', making twitter visible for approved users. You and anyone must tweet wisely, not sharing any personal information and try to not befriend with strangers. As we have previously said, it's easy to get impersonation! We also suggest installing a good antivirus, not only for Twitter but for the general use of the Internet. Fake news are other type of danger, since due to Twitter masssive spread, they come to you one after another.

If you are careful enough, its difficult get any problem in this network! Taking these into account is easy, as most of them are common sense.

How do I use Twitter?

When you look up for the workd 'twitter' on Google, the first result is the page itself. Click where you can read Twitter. It's what's happening. You will see a page like this one below:

Click where you can read 'Sign up' and a new window will appear. You will complete the basic process of registration in any website.

Once you have completed this step, you will have your own Twitter account! Your profile should look like this:

And about creating content, is as easy as Facebook. You must go to the 'Start' page. On the top you will read 'What's going on?'; that is the place in which you can write whatever you want in 280 characters! Once you are finished, click on 'Tweet'.

As you can see, it's really easy to use this network. You can follow people, hashtags, look for trends... Everything is available in the 'To explore' page!

Our Twitter account is @coleinexistent