TECHNOLOGY

Twitter

Twitter has been described as akin to a Web-based IRC client.^[23] The Twitter Web interface uses the Ruby on Rails framework^[24] and from the spring of 2007 until 2008 the actual messages were handled by a pure-Ruby persistent queue server called Starling.^[25] Starling was replaced in 2008 with a new persistentqueue server written in the Scala programming language.^[26] The Twitter API itself allows the integration of Twitter with other web services and applications.^[27]Twitter uses a system of hashtags, a word or phrase prefixed with a #, such as #beer.^[28] to allow messages to be tagged for searching. Similarly, the @ sign followed by a username, such as @example, allows users to send messages directly to each other.^[29] A message preceded by the @username prefix can still be read by anyone, but is primarily treated as being directed at the user in question.

Twitter