Founded in 2006 in California by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz
Stone, Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging tool for users
to send free short messages of 140 characters maximum, called tweets,
via the internet, IM (Instant Messaging), or SMS (Short Message
Service). Sometimes described as the SMS of the internet, Twitter has
since gained worldwide popularity, with 106 million users in April
2010, and 300,000 new users per day. As for tweets, there were 5,000
per day in 2007, 300,000 in 2008, 2.5 million in 2009, 50 million in
January 2010, and 55 million in April 2010, with the archiving of
tweets by the Library of Congress as a reflection of the trends of our
time, and their inclusion by Google in the results of its search
engine.