X, commonly referred to by its former name Twitter, is a social media website based in the United States. With over 500 million users, it is one of the world's largest social networks and the fifth-most visited website in the world.[4][5] Users can share text messages, images, and videos through short posts (originally called "tweets").[6] X also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists and communities, and Spaces, a social audio feature. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature.
This article is about the social networking service. For the former parent company, see Twitter, Inc.Formerly
Twitter (2006–2023)
Multilingual
March 21, 2006, in San Francisco, California, U.S.
Worldwide, except blocking countries
- Odeo (March–October 2006)
- Obvious Corporation (2006–2007)
- Twitter, Inc. (2007–2023)
- X Corp. (2023–present)
Required[b]
July 15, 2006
Active
The service is owned by the American company X Corp., the successor of Twitter, Inc. Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, and launched in July of that year. Twitter grew quickly, and by 2012, more than 100 million users produced 340 million tweets per day.[7] Twitter, Inc., was based in San Francisco, California, and had more than 25 offices around the world.[8] A signature characteristic of the service is that posts are required to be brief (originally 140 characters, later expanded to 280 in 2017).[9] The majority of tweets are produced by a minority of users.[10][11] In 2020, it was estimated that approximately 48 million accounts (15% of all accounts) were not genuine people.[12]
In October 2022, billionaire Elon Musk acquired Twitter for US$44 billion, gaining control of the platform and becoming the chief executive officer (CEO).[13][14][15][16] He wanted to promote free speech, but since the acquisition, the platform has been criticized for enabling the increased spread of disinformation,[17][18][19] hate speech[20][21][22] (antisemitism,[23][24] homophobia, transphobia)[25][26] and child pornography.[27] Linda Yaccarino succeeded Musk as CEO on June 5, 2023, with Musk remaining as the chairman and the chief technology officer.[28][29][30] In July 2023, Musk announced that Twitter would be rebranded to X and the bird logo would be retired.[31][32] In December 2023, Fidelity estimated the value of the company to be down 71.5 percent from its purchase price.[33] Although the service is now called X, the primary domain name 'twitter.com' remains in place as of April 2024, with the 'x.com' URL redirecting to that address.
Technology
Implementation
Twitter relies on open-source software.[291] The Twitter Web interface uses the Ruby on Rails framework,[292] deployed on a performance enhanced Ruby Enterprise Edition implementation of Ruby.[293]
In the early days of Twitter, tweets were stored in MySQL databases that were temporally sharded (large databases were split based on time of posting). After the huge volume of tweets coming in caused problems reading from and writing to these databases, the company decided that the system needed re-engineering.[66]
From Spring 2007 to 2008, the messages were handled by a Ruby persistent queue server called Starling.[294] Since 2009, implementation has been gradually replaced with software written in Scala.[295] The switch from Ruby to Scala and the JVM has given Twitter a performance boost from 200 to 300 requests per second per host to around 10,000–20,000 requests per second per host. This boost was greater than the 10x improvement that Twitter's engineers envisioned when starting the switch. The continued development of Twitter has also involved a switch from monolithic development of a single app to an architecture where different services are built independently and joined through remote procedure calls.[66]
As of April 6, 2011, Twitter engineers confirmed that they had switched away from their Ruby on Rails search stack to a Java server they call Blender.[296]
Individual tweets are registered under unique IDs called snowflakes, and geolocation data is added using 'Rockdove'. The URL shortener t.co then checks for a spam link and shortens the URL. Next, the tweets are stored in a MySQL database using Gizzard, and the user receives an acknowledgement that the tweets were sent. Tweets are then sent to search engines via the Firehose API. The process is managed by FlockDB and takes an average of 350 ms.[291]
On August 16, 2013, Raffi Krikorian, Twitter's vice president of platform engineering, shared in a blog post that the company's infrastructure handled almost 143,000 tweets per second during that week, setting a new record. Krikorian explained that Twitter achieved this record by blending its homegrown and open source technologies.[66][297]
API and developer platform
Twitter was recognized for having one of the most open and powerful developer APIs of any major technology company.[298] The service's API allows other web services and applications to integrate with Twitter.[299] Developer interest in Twitter began immediately following its launch, prompting the company to release the first version of its public API in September 2006.[300] The API quickly became iconic as a reference implementation for public REST APIs and is widely cited in programming tutorials.[301]
From 2006 until 2010, Twitter's developer platform experienced strong growth and a highly favorable reputation. Developers built upon the public API to create the first Twitter mobile phone clients as well as the first URL shortener. Between 2010 and 2012, however, Twitter made a number of decisions that were received unfavorably by the developer community.[302] In 2010, Twitter mandated that all developers adopt OAuth authentication with just 9 weeks of notice.[303] Later that year, Twitter launched its own URL shortener, in direct competition with some of its most well-known third-party developers.[304] And in 2012, Twitter introduced stricter usage limits for its API, "completely crippling" some developers.[305][306] While these moves successfully increased the stability and security of the service, they were broadly perceived as hostile to developers, causing them to lose trust in the platform.[307]
In July 2020, Twitter released version 2.0 of the public API[308] and began showcasing Twitter apps made by third-party developers on its Twitter Toolbox section in April 2022.[309]
In January 2023, Twitter ended third-party access to its APIs, forcing all third-party Twitter clients to shut down.[310] This was controversial among the developer community, as many third-party apps predated the company's official apps, and the change was not announced beforehand. Twitterrific's Sean Heber confirmed in a blog post that the 16-year-old app has been discontinued. "We are sorry to say that the app's sudden and undignified demise is due to an unannounced and undocumented policy change by an increasingly capricious Twitter – a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer."[311]
In February 2023, Twitter announced it would be ending free access to Twitter API, and began offering paid tier plans with a more limited access.[312]
Innovators patent agreement
On April 17, 2012, Twitter announced it would implement an "Innovators Patent Agreement" which would obligate Twitter to only use its patents for defensive purposes.[313]
Open source
Twitter has a history of both using and releasing open-source software while overcoming technical challenges of their service.[314] A page in their developer documentation thanks dozens of open-source projects which they have used, from revision control software like Git to programming languages such as Ruby and Scala.[315] Software released as open source by the company includes the Gizzard Scala framework for creating distributed datastores, the distributed graph database FlockDB, the Finagle library for building asynchronous RPC servers and clients, the TwUI user interface framework for iOS, and the Bower client-side package manager.[316] The popular Bootstrap frontend framework was also started at Twitter and is 10th most popular repository on GitHub.[317]
On March 31, 2023, Twitter released the source code for Twitter's recommendation algorithm,[318] which determines what tweets show up on the user's personal timeline, to GitHub. According to Twitter's blog post: "We believe that we have a responsibility, as the town square of the internet, to make our platform transparent. So today we are taking the first step in a new era of transparency and opening much of our source code to the global community."[319] Elon Musk, the CEO at the time, had been promising the move for a while — on March 24, 2022, before he owned the site, he polled his followers about whether Twitter's algorithm should be open source, and around 83 percent of the responses said "yes". In February, he promised it would happen within a week before pushing back the deadline to March 31 earlier this month.[320]
Also in March 2023, Twitter suffered a security attack which resulted in proprietary code being released. Twitter then had the source code removed.[321]
Interface
Twitter introduced the first major redesign of its user interface in September 2010, adopting a dual-pane layout with a navigation bar along the top of the screen, and an increased focus on the inline embedding of multimedia content. Critics considered the redesign an attempt to emulate features and experiences found in mobile apps and third-party Twitter clients.[322][323][324][325]
The new layout was revised in 2011 with a focus on continuity with the web and mobile versions, introducing "Connect" (interactions with other users such as replies) and "Discover" (further information regarding trending topics and news headlines) tabs, an updated profile design, and moving all content to the right pane (leaving the left pane dedicated to functions and the trending topics list).[326] In March 2012, Twitter became available in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu, the first right-to-left language versions of the site.[327] In 2023 the Twitter Web site listed 34 languages supported by Twitter.com.[328]
In September 2012, a new layout for profiles was introduced, with larger "covers" that could be customized with a custom header image, and a display of the user's recent photos posted.[329] The "Discover" tab was discontinued in April 2015,[330] and was succeeded on the mobile app by an "Explore" tab—which features trending topics and moments.[331]
In September 2018, Twitter began to migrate selected web users to its progressive web app (based on its Twitter Lite experience for mobile web), reducing the interface to two columns. Migrations to this iteration of Twitter increased in April 2019, with some users receiving it with a modified layout.[332][333]
In July 2019, Twitter officially released this redesign, with no further option to opt-out while logged in. It is designed to further-unify Twitter's user experience between the web and mobile application versions, adopting a three-column layout with a sidebar containing links to common areas (including "Explore" that has been merged with the search page) which previously appeared in a horizontal top bar, profile elements such as picture and header images and biography texts merged into the same column as the timeline, and features from the mobile version (such as multi-account support, and an opt-out for the "top tweets" mode on the timeline).[334][335]
Security
In response to early Twitter security breaches, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) brought charges against the service; the charges were settled on June 24, 2010. This was the first time the FTC had taken action against a social network for security lapses. The settlement requires Twitter to take a number of steps to secure users' private information, including maintenance of a "comprehensive information security program" to be independently audited biannually.[336]
After a number of high-profile hacks of official accounts, including those of the Associated Press and The Guardian,[337] in April 2013, Twitter announced a two-factor login verification as an added measure against hacking.[338]
On July 15, 2020, a major hack of Twitter affected 130 high-profile accounts, both verified and unverified ones such as Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk; the hack allowed bitcoin scammers to send tweets via the compromised accounts that asked the followers to send bitcoin to a given public address, with the promise to double their money.[339] Within a few hours, Twitter disabled tweeting and reset passwords from all verified accounts.[339] Analysis of the event revealed that the scammers had used social engineering to obtain credentials from Twitter employees to access an administration tool used by Twitter to view and change these accounts' personal details as to gain access as part of a "smash and grab" attempt to make money quickly, with an estimated US$120,000 in bitcoin deposited in various accounts before Twitter intervened.[340] Several law enforcement entities including the FBI launched investigations into the attack.[341]
On August 5, 2022, Twitter disclosed that a bug introduced in a June 2021 update to the service allowed threat actors to link email addresses and phone numbers to twitter user's accounts.[342][343] The bug was reported through Twitter's bug bounty program in January 2022 and subsequently fixed. While Twitter originally believed no one had taken advantage of the vulnerability, it was later revealed that a user on the online hacking forum Breached Forums had used the vulnerability to compile a list of over 5.4 million user profiles, which they offered to sell for $30,000.[344][345] The information compiled by the hacker includes user's screen names, location and email addresses which could be utilised in phishing attacks or used to deanonymize accounts running under pseudonyms.
