All A Twitter

Heard of Twitter? No? Don’t worry; I hadn’t either until a few weeks ago. For those of you who like to be up on the latest and greatest social networking tools the web has to offer, allow me to give you a brief introduction to Twitter.

Starting with the Wikipedia definition:
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific.
Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default).
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

Still confused? Let’s break things down:

1) What is social networking?
We can think of social networks as “virtual communities.” Web-based networks of people who are communicating with each other in some way. Notable examples include Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, and of course Twitter.
This video from YouTube gives a quick overview of what is social network is and why it’s important:

2) What is micro-blogging?
Micro-blogging is basically blogging abbreviated. Posts are generally limited to 200 characters or less (in the case of Twitter to 140 characters or less). A micro-blog can serve as a kind of “update” or newsflash.

Now that you’ve got the basics, let’s have a closer look at Twitter itself. Twitter’s url http://twitter.com. The homepage gives a “what, why, and how” explanation of Twitter. This is also where you can sign up for your very own Twitter account. Yay!

3) Why does Twitter matter?
Jeff Jarvis (of the BuzzMachine blog) does a better job explaining this that I could. Have a read.

Finally, take a look at the following video, which gives you a view of what Twitter actually looks like and gives a brief explanation of how to use it. You can tell this stuff is cutting edge because the guy in the video sounds like he’s about 14!

Hope this information is useful to anyone thinking of getting a Twitter account, or who are simply wondering about its relevance.

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