How They Work:“How Twitter Works, Part II”

Simply put, a Tweet is a message sent on Twitter. To send or receive a Tweet, you have to create a free account with Twitter. You also need to have friends and contacts with Twitter accounts, otherwise you’re typing to no body. Of course, you could use Twitter as a blog and keep all of your Tweets public, meaning anyone could read them on your personal Twitter profile page. But if you want to use Twitter as a way to keep in touch with friends, you’ll need to convince them to sign up, too. This is common with all social networks! Once you have an account, you can begin building your network of contacts. You can invite other users to receive your Tweets, and you can follow other members’ posts. As you receive Tweets, you may discover you’re looking into only part of a conversation. You’ll see your contact’s posts, but if he or she is sending messages in response to someone who isn’t in your network, you won’t see the other person’s messages. Tweets have a few limitations, mostly due to the fact that Twitter’s design relies heavily on cell phone text messages. Tweets can only have up to 140 characters before the system cuts off the rest of the message for cell phone users. Members can read full Tweets on their Twitter Web pages or by using a third-party developer’s desktop or Web-based application. Tweets can only contain text; members can’t include pictures, video or other computer files with Tweet messages. Members who want people in their network to look at multimedia content must find a Web page to host the files, and then send a message containing the page’s address to their networks. Twitter converts all addresses more than 30 characters in length into tiny URL links that compress the full Web site address to save space. Twitter makes it easy to opt into or out of networks. If you join Twitter and find that you’re being bombarded by Tweets from a particular member, you can choose to stop following his or her feed. All you have to do is send a message to Twitter that says “off,” plus the member’s user name. Later, if you find that you miss the sender’s updates, you can type “follow,” plus the user’s name. As long as the sender has kept you in his or her network, you’ll start receiving those messages again. Doesn’t it sound so simple? Twitter bases its application programming interface (API) off the Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture. REST architecture refers to a collection of network design principles that define resources and ways to address and access data. The architecture is a design philosophy, not a set of blueprints, there’s no single prescribed arrangement of computers, servers and cables. For Twitter, a REST architecture in part means that the service works with most Web syndication formats. Web syndication is a pretty simple concept: An application gathers information from one source and sends it out to various destinations. There are a few syndication formats used on the Web. Twitter is compatible with two of them. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and Atom Syndication Format (Atom). Both formats retrieve data from one resource and send it to another. (To be cont’d) eddie@afrowebs.com