Blackwell Reference Online

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Twitter is a free service that combines elements of blogging and social networking (→  Blogger ; Facebook ; Social Networks ) and is considered as a form of →  social media . Commonly described as a micro-blogging service, it is one of a class of communication and information platforms defined as social awareness streams that allow for the rapid and immediate sharing of content, from short status messages to links, photos, and videos ( Naaman et al. 2011 ; →  Photography ; Video ). Twitter was launched in August 2006 by a San Francisco start-up called Odeo, and was primarily intended as a cell-phone application. The service came to prominence when it won an award at the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) interactive festival in Austin, Texas. It broke into the mainstream in the following two years. Twitter attracted widespread media coverage for its use during key moments such as the Chinese earthquake in May 2008, the Mumbai attacks in November 2009, the Hudson River plane crash in January 2009, and the Iranian protests of June 2009. The reporting in the US of Twitter between 2006 and 2009 was largely positive, despite some vocal skeptics ( Arceneaux & Schmitz Weiss 2010 ). Initially, Twitter's website prompted its users with the question “What are you doing?” This was changed in 2009 to “What's happening?” Twitter now describes itself as “a real-time information network that ... log in or subscribe to read full text