American social networking service / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
X, originally branded as Twitter[lower-alpha 1], is a social networking and microblogging service. Users use any device with an internet connection and a web browser to send and to read messages, called "tweets". For years, tweets could be up to 140 characters long, then doubled to 280 characters in November 2017.[4] Tweets appear on the user's profile webpage. Tweets can usually be read by anyone, but senders can also keep messages private. Private tweets only go to their list of friends. Users may subscribe to tweets from other people. This is called following, and subscribers are known as followers. As of late 2009, users can also follow lists of authors.[5][6]
Formerly | Twitter (2006–2023) |
---|---|
Company type | Private |
Industry | Websites |
Founded | San Francisco, California, United States |
Founder | Jack Dorsey Evan Williams Biz Stone |
Headquarters | 795 Folsom St., Suite 600, San Francisco, CA 94107 , United States[1] |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Elon Musk (Owner, CTO & Chairman) Linda Yaccarino (CEO) Evan Williams (Product Strategy) Biz Stone (Creative Director) |
Services | Social networking, Microblogging |
Revenue | US $5.081 billion (2021)[2] |
Number of employees | 7,500 (2021)[3] |
Website | twitter.com x.com (redirects to Twitter) |
All users can send and receive tweets using the Twitter website. They can also use other applications that work with Twitter on smartphones. Twitter by Short Message Service (SMS) is available in certain countries.[7] Using Twitter is free, but sending or getting tweets by SMS may cost money. The website is based in San Francisco, California. Twitter also has servers and offices in San Antonio, Texas and Boston, Massachusetts, and soon in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Twitter has become very popular worldwide since Jack Dorsey created it in 2006. It now has more than 126 million users.[8] It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet".[9]
On April 25, 2022, the Twitter board of directors agreed to Elon Musk's US$44 billion offer to buy the company.[10] On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk took control of the company and fired CEO Parag Agarwal along with other top executives.[11]