What is Twitter and why does it keep following me around?
Twitter Explained
Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you answer the question, "What are you doing?" by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called "tweets", to your friends, or "followers."
The short format of the tweet is a defining characteristic of the service,
allowing informal collaboration and quick information sharing that provides
relief from rising email and IM fatigue. Twittering is also a less gated
method of communication: you can share information with people that you wouldn't
normally exchange email or IM messages with, opening up your circle of contacts
to an ever-growing community of like-minded people.
You can send your messages 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. (See below for links to Twitter tools and applications.)
Your tweets are displayed on your profile page, on the home page of each of your followers, and in the Twitter public timeline (unless you disable this in your account settings.)
You can receive tweets by visiting the Twitter website, IM, SMS, RSS, email or via a third-party application.
For more information about what Twitter is all about, see:
- Still Don’t Get Twitter? Maybe This Will Help
- Twitter in Plain English
- Twitter Fan Wiki
- Official Twitter Blog
- Twitter Handbook Blog
- The Big Juicy Twitter Guide by Caroline Middlebrook
- Twitter Profile on CrunchBase
- Versatility Made Twitter What It Is Today: A Research Paper on Twitter
- ne major problem for any developer is that there are often too many “important sources,” and often, new sources appear, and not everyone knows they exist.
