Tweet – Saudi Royal invests fortune on twitter…..

Its dictionary meaning would be – ‘small, tremulous sounds as a bird, to talk lightly and rapidly esp of trivial matters’…………. But it has come a very long way..When the protests of Anna Hazare was on, social medias, Television channels and newspapers  played a big role in projecting him to the fore.  Social medias played a pivotal role in Arab protests, Egypt and elsewhere and the power of micro-blogging sites have already been felt.

Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal is a member of the Saudi royal family who has amassed a fortune through investments in real estate and the stock market.  He is founder, CEO and 95%-owner of Kingdom Holding Company.  He according to Forbes is the  26th richest person in the world and richest Saudi Arabian.  The  billionaire Saudi  Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has announced that he is investing $300 million into social networking site Twitter.  The  Saudi prince already boasts a business portfolio that includes shares in Apple, AOL, News Corp and Fox News. With the present investment, sure his media influence would stand widened.   Recent months have seen flocking of Arab activists from Tunisia to Bahrain to Twitter to coordinate protests voicing their opposition to long reigning autocratic rules.   There has been a  recent Saudi Arabian law  providing the State undiluted  powers to fine or block online news and commentary websites if they are deemed to be offensive, compromising the nation’s economy or security, or violating Islamic sharia law.

Arabic is now the fastest growing language on Twitter, according to a study released last month by French social media research firm Semiocast.  Although Arabic tweets account for just over 1 per cent of all Twitter messages, their volume has jumped 22 times over the past year, Semiocast said.  Prince Alwaleed is launching a new Arabic news channel that will challenge established players such as Qatar's Al-Jazeera and Saudi-funded Al-Arabiya.  The channel, which will be called Alarab, is expected to begin operations next year and will feature reports from business news service Bloomberg LP.

If you are to ask what Twitter is ?  - most unlikely or perhaps you are still not using this social networking site.    Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts.  The posts are known as ‘tweets’ but are limited to 140 characters ** only. It was created and launched in  2006 by Jack Dorsey.   The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 300 million users as of 2011 generating over 300 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.  Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco.

The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010.  Tweets are publicly visible by default; however, senders can restrict message delivery to just their followers. Users can tweet via the Twitter website, compatible external applications (such as for smartphones), or by Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries.  While the service is free, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

A "MouseOver" exploit occurred on September 21, 2010, when an XSS Worm became active on Twitter. When an account user held the mouse cursor over blacked out parts of a tweet, the worm within the script would automatically open links and re-post itself on the reader's account.  The exploit was then re-used to post pop-up ads and links to pornographic sites.  This reportedly is now fully patched.

**  In computer terminology, a character is a unit of information  of  symbol, such as an alphabet or syllable in the written form of a natural language.  Examples of characters include letters, numerical digits, and common punctuation marks (such as '.' or '-'). 

With regards – S. Sampathkumar

PS :  I don’t tweet for the simple reason that most of my posts run into pages and naturally cannot fit into their scheme of things..