"Twitter Genius"

A Craiglist's job listing posting caught my eye today. The role is as an
“expert” social media marketer for some sort of e-commerce startup. “I need someone who tweets in their sleep and updates their fb status before calling their mom on Mother’s Day,” the description reads. Wait until you see what the applicant need to do to apply for this kind of job.

1. Email me two tweets. The first should be about your experience. The second should by why you’re perfect for this job. If you exceed twitter’s allotted character count, you’re done.
2. Email me your Twitter name in link form (e.g. http://www.twitter.com/YOURNAME)
3. Tell me how many followers you have and how many people you follow.
4. Tell me who’s the best person you follow and why (in tweet form).
5. Tell me what’s the best way to get more followers (in tweet form).
6. Specific salary requirement.

Need I say more. The Twitter as the subject matter always fascinates me. The fact like how they make money beside raising fund from the venture capitals still remain unclear to me. So I dig up a little bit to search some info like when did they start, who coined the name "Twitter", what technology that they use to build Twitter and how their user use the service.

Obviously wiki is the best source of information provider for this kind of enquiry. There is lot of facts that I never heard/read before. So I compile the most interesting facts for my own reference or your pleasure.

Twitter history facts:

Twitter began in a "daylong brainstorming session" that was held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo in an attempt to break out of a creative slump. At that meeting Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group, a concept partly inspired by the SMS group messaging service TXTMob

We wanted to capture that in the name — we wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word "twitch," because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But "twitch" is not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word "twitter," and it was just perfect.

Twitter finance facts:

In total, Twitter has raised over US$57 million from venture capitalists.

Some of Twitter's documents covering revenue and user growth were published on TechCrunch after they were retrieved by the hacker, Croll Hacker. These contained internal projections that in 2009 they would have revenues of $400,000 in the third quarter (Q3) and $4 million in the fourth quarter (Q4) along with 25 million users at the end of the year. The projections for the end of 2013 were $1.54 billion in revenue, $111 million in net earnings, and 1 billion users.

Twitter technology fact:

The Twitter Web interface uses the Ruby on Rails framework, deployed on a Ruby Enterprise Edition rather than a vanilla Ruby implementation for performance reasons.

Twitter content (based on a research)

Other facts:

On January 5, 2009, 33 high-profile Twitter accounts were compromised after a Twitter administrator's password was guessed by a dictionary attack. Falsified tweets—including sexually explicit and drug-related messages—were then sent from the accounts.

On August 6, 2009, Twitter and Facebook suffered from a denial-of-service attack, causing the Twitter website to be offline for several hours.

 Notable usage:

• in political campaign
• in legal proceeding
• in education
• in Emergencies
• in protest and politics
• in public relations
• in reporting dissent
• in space exploration
• to survey opinion

I guess this simple service has many interpretation by public at large for both purposes, for bad or for the good of the mankind.