Twitter started in March 2006 as a research and development project for Obvious, LLC, a start-up company based in San Francisco. Initially, Twitter was used by the company for internal purposes and was initially launched in October of the same year.

Because of Twitter’s amazing service, visitors to the site have shot up to almost 500,000 as of last year, and have not dropped down since then in the ending months of the previous year. Twitter gained instantly popularity, even winning the South by Southwest Web Awards in 2007 in the blog category, with Jack Dorsey as the man behind the Twitter concept. In his acceptance speech at the awards event, he playfully said “We’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!”

What separates Twitter from other social networking and micro-blogging service sites is that it allows its users to send text-based updates and posts up to 140 characters in length, otherwise known as “tweets” to the Twitter site, through short message service (SMS), instant messaging service or an application like Twitterific.

Tweets are displayed on your profile page and sent instantly to other Twitter users who have signed up for the said service. Although the delivery is to everyone by default, the sender has the option to limit delivery to selected people in his/her network of friends. Users can get updates through the Twitter site, SMS, RSS, instant messaging, email or any third party application. Currently, there are four gateway numbers available for SMS. These include short codes for the US, Canada, India and a UK code for international use. There are also a number of third party applications that offer incoming and outgoing updates through email as well.

And because of Twitter’s booming success, many other sites around the world have also followed its concept, offering country-specific or a combination of micro-blogging services along with other options like file sharing. In fact, there are actually more than a hundred international sites similar to Twitter at present.

However, the boons of Twitter’s success have never been without banes, as the site started experiencing several challenges with regard to its ballooning user base.

Security problems began to arise with Twitter using the SMS message originator that would serve as authentication of the user’s account. With the use of another application to send a spoof text message, Twitter sent the message on a user’s page. It had to be noted that such may only be used if the user’s phone number is known. Twitter then launched an optional PIN after a few weeks of discovering this security glitch. This feature allows its users for specifying and authenticating originating SMS messages.

While social networking sites such as Twitter may provide convenience to technology-savvy users, there is still an inconvenient truth to it. And the primary reason why Twitter is created may but draw out mixed feelings from the very people who have made it known anyway – its users. Sure, using Twitter can be a great way to connect with friends. However, some users may feel that rather too connected and thus cause them a good deal of annoyance, what with having to come to grips with incoming messages at seemingly unusual hours. Add that up to higher mobile phone bills and the being compelled to tell your acquaintances to stop cluing you in on what they are doing every so often.

Twitter users may indeed have to share the same boons and banes of the site’s seemingly bittersweet success. Twitter should be able to address problems and improve their services more, unless it wants to keep their users “tweeting”. On the other hand, users should also know when “tweeting” is too much, and when too much is enough.