Social networking websites have acquired a great influence on people’s lives. These websites help people interact with family members and friends who are residing in far off places, and even with their next door buddies. Online socializing is fun and notably inexpensive. People are only charged for their usual internet connection, which is nothing in comparison to the expanses of phone calls, postal mails, and airplane tickets. Orkut.com and Facebook.com were thought to be the leaders of internet social networking, unless Twitter.com entered the race and alarmingly, began attaining a lot of attention from social networking freaks.

Twitter.com is a social interaction portal that allows people to join it free of cost, and interact with their friends and family online. People stay connected to their circle by answering a simple and easy question, “What Are You Doing?” This question can get so many diversified answers that one will be astonished to witness the variety. Users get to know about whatever their buddies are doing when the status is updated. This is a uniquely different idea behind this simple yet interesting website.

This unique website was created as a prototype in March 2006, as a result of the idea that overcame Jack Dorsey’s thoughts. Launched back in August 2006, Twitter was then funded by Obvious Corporation. When the welcoming response was witnessed, Twitter was brought out of the influence of Obvious, and Twitter Inc was founded in May 2007. It has its offices in the SoMA neighborhood of San Francisco, CA

When one visits Twitter.com, one is amazed at the beautiful layout of Twitter homepage. It is done in tones of turquoise, blue, and green; which give such a fresh effect to eyes that the experience is unmatched. Adding to the beauty is the sweet little bird sitting on left side of the page. A brief overview of Twitter is given there, plus an option to join the network or sign in if already joined. The homepage features links to further pages like About Twitter, Help, Contact Twitter, Terms and Policy, and Jobs etc.

Object of Twitter.com is to provide such a platform to people which can help them avoid the hassle of sending multiple emails to contacts, to let them know about a single incident. Here, users simply update their status, which is distributed to all their contacts at Twitter. Users can create quick status updates or carry on a discussion with friends.

“Tweet” is the name given to messages and updates users send on Twitter. You can have restricted access to your tweets that only your friends can read them, or you can make them public (almost exactly like Orkut’s scraps). Twitter is equally famous on the cell phones, but here are some limitations e.g. a tweet sent from cell phone can go no longer than a mere 140 characters. Simplicity of this network doesn’t allow users to share photos, files and other stuff via tweets; a tweet can only contain TEXT. Make a website or upload your data to an online file hosting site, and send the link to your entire friend community via tweet.

There are few third party applications for the ease of Twitter users including Twitterlicious for PCs and Twitterific for Macs (allowing users to access Twitter through desktop applications), Outwit (that allows Windows users to access Twitter via Outlook Express), Tweet Scan (that helps search public tweets in real time), Twessenger (which joins together with Windows Live Messenger) and many more.

According to Twitter, it is not the right time to indulge in money making processes, thus it is only concentrating on the development thereof. In short, this remote social networking panel is based on simplicity, and this is the secret of its popularity amongst people.