List of Twitter features

, is an American microblogging and social networking platform where registered users can share short messages in short posts, as well as liking posts and repost, as well as read and respond to other user's public posts.

Twitter/X structure

Posts (Tweets)

Short posts, often called as tweets, are publicly visible by default, but senders can restrict message delivery to only their followers. Users can also mute users they do not wish to interact with, block accounts from viewing their tweets and remove accounts from their followers list. Users can post via the X/Twitter website, and may also subscribe other users known as "following" and subscribers are known as "followers" Individual posts can be forwarded by other users to their own feed, a process originally known as a retweeting, later known as a reposting. In 2015, Twitter launched "quote tweet", a feature that allows users to add a comment to their retweets/reposts, nesting one post in the other. Users can also "like" individual posts.
The counters for likes, reposts, and replies appear next to the respective buttons in news feeds, called timelines, such as on profile pages and search results. Counters for likes and reposts exist on a post's standalone page too. Since September 2020, quote post, formerly known as "quote tweets" and "retweet with comment", have an own counter on their posts page. Until the legacy desktop front end that was discontinued in 2020, a row with miniature profile pictures of up to ten liking or reposting users was displayed, as well as a reply counter next to the according button on a post's page.
X allows users to update their profile via their mobile phone either by text messaging or by apps released for certain smartphones and tablets. X has been compared to a web-based Internet Relay Chat client. In a 2009 Time magazine essay, technology author Steven Johnson described the basic mechanics of Twitter as "remarkably simple":
According to research published in April 2014, around 44% of user accounts have never posted.
The first post/tweet was created by Jack Dorsey, one of the original creators of Twitter/X, at 12:50 pm PST on March 21, 2006, and reads "just setting up my twttr". In 2009, the first post was sent from space. US astronauts Nicola Stott and Jeff Williams took part in a live 'tweetup' from the International Space Station with around 35 members of the public at the NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
In March 2021, Jack Dorsey listed his first post for sale. The post was sold for $2.5 million, it was sold to a Malaysian businessman, Sina Estavi. Along with the metadata of the original post, the buyer was to receive a certificate that was digitally signed and verified by Dorsey.

Content

-based market-research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets over a two-week period in August 2009 from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm and separated them into six categories. Pointless babble made up 40%, with 38% being conversational. Pass-along value had 9%, self-promotion 6% with spam and news each making 4%.
Despite Jack Dorsey's own open contention that a message on Twitter is "a short burst of inconsequential information", social networking researcher danah boyd responded to the Pear Analytics survey by arguing that what the Pear researchers labeled "pointless babble" is better characterized as "social grooming" or "peripheral awareness". Similarly, a survey of Twitter users found that a more specific social role of passing along messages that include a hyperlink is an expectation of reciprocal linking by followers.

Formats

Hashtags, usernames, retweets and replies

Users can group posts together by topic or type by use of hashtags – words or phrases prefixed with a "#" sign. Similarly, the "@" sign followed by a username is used for mentioning or replying to other users.
In 2014, in anticipation for the FIFA World Cup, Twitter introduced hashflags, special hashtags that automatically generate a custom emoji next to them for a certain period of time, following the success of a similar campaign during the 2010 World Cup. Hashflags may be generated by Twitter themselves or be purchased by corporations.
To repost a message from another user and share it with one's own followers, a user can click the repost button within the post. Users can reply to other accounts' replies, Since November 2019, users can hide replies to their messages. Since May 2020, users can select who can reply each of their posts before sending them: anyone, accounts who follow the poster, specific accounts, and none. This ability was upgraded in July 2021 to make the feature retroactively applicable to posts after they have been sent out.

Using SMS

Through SMS, users can communicate with Twitter through five gateway numbers: short codes for the United States, Canada, India, New Zealand, and an Isle of Man-based number for international use. There is also a short code in the United Kingdom which is only accessible to those on the Vodafone, O2 and Orange networks. In India, since Twitter only supports posts from Bharti Airtel, an alternative platform called smsTweet was set up by a user to work on all networks. A similar platform called GladlyCast exists for mobile phone users in Singapore and Malaysia.
Tweets were set to a largely constrictive 140-character limit for compatibility with SMS messaging, introducing the shorthand notation and slang commonly used in SMS messages. The 140-character limit also increased the usage of URL shortening services such as bit.ly, goo.gl, tinyurl.com, tr.im, and other content-hosting services such as TwitPic, memozu.com and NotePub to accommodate multimedia content and text longer than 140 characters. Since June 2011, Twitter has used its own t.co domain for automatic shortening of all URLs posted on its site, making other link shorteners unnecessary for staying within Twitter's 140 character limit.
In August 2019, Jack Dorsey's account was hacked by using the Twitter SMS to post feature to send crude messages. Days later, the ability to send a tweet via SMS was temporarily turned off.
In April 2020, Twitter discontinued the ability to receive SMS messages containing the text of new tweets in most countries.

Character limits

In 2016, Twitter announced that media such as photos, videos, and the person's handle, would not count against the already constrictive 140 character limit. A user photo post used to count for a large chunk of a tweet, about 24 characters. Attachments and links would also no longer be part of the character limit.
On March 29, 2016, Twitter introduced the ability to add a caption of up to 480 characters to each image attached to a tweet. This caption can be accessed by screen reading software or by hovering the mouse above a picture inside TweetDeck.
Since March 30, 2017, Twitter handles are outside the tweet itself, therefore they no longer count towards the character limit. Only new Twitter handles added to the conversation count towards the limit.
In 2017, Twitter doubled their historical 140-character-limitation to 280. Under the new limit, glyphs are counted as a variable number of characters, depending upon the script they are from: most European letters and punctuation forms count as one character, while each CJK glyph counts as two so that only 140 such glyphs can be used in a.

URL shortener

t.co is a URL shortening service created by Twitter. It is only available for links posted to Twitter and not available for general use. All links posted to Twitter use a t.co wrapper. Twitter created the service to try to protect users from malicious sites by warning users if a URL is potentially malicious before redirecting them, and uses the shortener to track clicks on links within tweets.
Having used the services of third parties TinyURL and bit.ly, Twitter began experimenting with its own URL shortening service for private messages in March 2010 using the twt.tl domain, before it purchased the t.co domain. The service was tested on the main site using the accounts @TwitterAPI, @rsarver and @raffi. On September 2, 2010, an email from Twitter to users said they would be expanding the roll-out of the service to users. On June 7, 2011, Twitter announced that it was rolling out the feature.
t.co faced controversy under the ownership of Elon Musk, as Twitter began blocking new tweets from containing links to other social networks, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Mastodon. Tweets containing the networks could not be shared, and existing tweets with links to the restricted sites would give an error upon attempting to visit the page via Twitter. The policy was soon reversed after extreme controversy.