Twitter is a website created by Jack Dorsey that allows its users to “micro blog” just about anything they have to say by using a maximum of 140 characters. Twitter’s meteoric rise to social networking prominence is a phenomenon that can only be compared to Facebook. Like it’s major competitor, (it should be noted that many people who have Twitter have Facebook and vice-versa) , it’s membership has grown exponentially in the past few years.

Twitter is a product of entrepreneurship. Twitter harnesses our technological capability of transferring information at a level that has never been seen before in history. Blogging is nothing new, but Jack Dorsey’s team was able to make a user friendly interface that almost anyone can figure out within a few minutes, and turns those users into real time commentators on the world around them.

http://www.gadgetell.com/technologytell/article/twitter-turns-5-today/

There are many comparisons that could be drawn to competitors like Facebook, but Twitter has successfully differentiated themselves from other social networking sites by making access to information quicker and shorter. Their “short and sweet” 140 characters or less method has been so successful that other “micro blogging” websites have adopted the same model. They saw a significant gap in the market, and despite social networking giants such as MySpace or Facebook they took the risk to change the online world forever. At over 200 million tweets per day, it looks like Twitter is far from peaking.