The SNS I have chosen for my ethnography is Twitter (http://www.twitter.com). Twitter was created by founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey and launched in 2006. Twitter is headquartered in the South Park neighborhood of San Francisco, California. Since its inception, Twitter has reportedly grown to over a million users, though the exact number would be hard to authenticate.

Twitter allows users to post short messages, called tweets, 140 characters or less, to a network of contacts and has been referred to as a system for micro-blogging. Rather than posting lengthy entries as would be found on a weblog, Twitters’ limited number of characters allows only for short messages. Once a message is created, it is sent to all the users on the creator’s contact list. This allows for rapid and efficient delivery to large groups of users as compared to sending messages via email or text message. Messages can also be sent privately to selected users rather than the entire contact list if desired.