Twitter is a social networking service that allows users to send and read short 140-character messages called “tweets”. Registered users can post and read tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through the website interface, SMS, or mobile phone apps. The service has over 310 million monthly active users.
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July of that year. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity. In 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as “the SMS of the Internet”. As of 2016, Twitter had more than 319 million monthly active users.