Twitter Reflection Essay

In March of 2006, a revolutionary web service was created by a team of four web developers. Since it’s launch in 2006, the website deemed “Twitter” has rapidly gained worldwide popularity. Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables users to send and read "tweets", which are text messages limited to 140 characters. Registered users can read and post tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through the website interface, SMS, or mobile device app. Along with it’s popularity, there have arisen many different positive consequences, as well as negative. Twitter has opened the doors to a variety of new ways of communication. From the everyday American who uses the site to keep up with friends and family, to a college professor exploring the latest in educational technology, to corporations and entire political parties using the site as a stage for protesting, Twitter has provided one of the largest platforms for instantaneous communication to a large audience of viewers. Another practical use for Twitter exists as an effective de facto emergency communication system for breaking news. It was neither intended nor designed for high performance communication, but the idea that it could be used for emergency communication certainly was not lost on the originators, who knew that the service could have wide-reaching effects early on when the San Francisco, California company used it to communicate during earthquakes. The Boston Police tweeted news of the arrest of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing suspect. A practical use that is being studied is Twitter's ability to track epidemics and how they spread. The site has also been used to cause problems by stirring controversy and hosting civil disobedience. In 2010, users expressed outrage over the Twitter Joke Trial by making obvious jokes about terrorism. Among normal users of the site, many debates have sprung up about supposed benefits of being connected to