History

• Twitter is the brainchild of software engineer Jack Dorsey together with entrepreneurs Evan Williams and Biz Stone, who developed and launched the site in 2006. The idea came as a way to quickly and succinctly keep in touch and up to date with friends around the world.
  
  

Popularity

• Since the launch in 2006, Twitter has grown into a global phenomenon. It allows people to find out not only what their friends are doing, but also to keep up to date with what celebrities are doing. Many celebrities are signed up and update followers on their daily activities. It is also used for breaking news, updates on traffic jams and weather reports.
  
  

Music

• Music Monday is not the only way of accessing music on Twitter. Artists and users can tweet website addresses that link to streaming or download sites of songs and albums. Users can follow performers to find out what they are doing daily and for gig dates and locations.
  
  

Marketing

• Twitter is a popular marketing tool for many online companies or celebrities. Once users become followers, it is a cheap/free way of getting a marketing message across to them. Links to websites and offers can be tweeted to thousands of followers.
  
  

Internet

• Twitter has licensed streams of tweets to companies such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo so real-time data can be included in Internet searches. This can sometimes mean news spreads faster through Twitter than in more traditional news websites that need more time to write the complete news article.