What is Twitter and how does it work?
by admin on Apr.08, 2009, under Social Bookmarking
What do Barack Obama, Stephen Fry and Britney Spears all have in common? They are all Twitter users.
Cyberspace is an ever changing world, and just as you’re getting to grips with Myspace and Facebook, a new phenomenon makes it’s big entrance.
For a craze that seems to have emerged from nowhere, Twitter has taken the world by storm, and proved particularly popular with celebrities, allowing them to frequently update their fans on their minute, by minute, hour, by hour activities.
But despite hearing about it in the news every week, a lot of us are not quite sure what Twitter is, and why it is so damn indispensable.
In short, Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging site that allows users to send and read other users’ updates, known as ‘tweets’, in real-time.
It is referred to as a micro-blogging site as the text-based posts or tweets can only be up to 140 characters in length. These updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to fellow tweeters who have signed up to receive them. Due to the brief nature of the site it is often described as the SMS of the web.
You can send posts using the Twitter website directly, as a single SMS alert, or via a third-party application such as Twirl, Snitter, or the Twitterfox add-on for Firefox.
You can receive tweets by visiting the Twitter website, IM, SMS, RSS, email or via a third-party application.
Twitter messages can be tagged using hastags, a word or phrase prefixed with a #, such as #shoes. This enables tweets on a specific topic to be found by simply searching for their common hashtag, provided that the user has tagged his or her tweet.
The @ sign before a username, such as @brian, is used to distinguish a reply directed at that user. A message preceded by the @username prefix can still be read by anyone, but is treated as directed firstly to the user in question.
Twitter is a great way to keep in touch with friend and family but is also tremendously useful for businesses to broadcast their news to customers.
To sum it up, Twitter is a speedy way to answer that ever-burning question: ‘What are you doing?’