TwitNine

Twitter is a fast-evolving, surprisingly powerful new way to exchange ideas and information, and stay in touch with people, businesses, and organizations that you care about. It’s a social network a kind of map of who you know and who you’re interested in (whether you know them personally or not) that you can access from your computer or your cellphone

Twitter has one central feature: It lets users instantly post entries of 140 characters or less, known as tweets, through the WWW.Twitter.com site or your cellphone, or by way of the numerous applications that are available for both.

On the most basic level, Twitter is a mobile social network that combines elements of short messaging services (SMS or texting), instant-messaging communication tools, such as AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), and blog publishing software, such as Blogger or WordPress. Like blogging, your tweets are generally published to the world at large where anyone can read them on Twitter. com (unless you choose a private account, so that only those you choose can see your tweets). Unlike blogging, you’re limited to just 140 characters. Like instant messaging, you can communicate directly with people (through direct messages), but unlike instant messaging, each message has its own unique resource locator (URL), so each message is actually a Web page. Instant messaging also lacks the social network “following” features of Twitter and basic ideas like “publish-subscribe” and one-to-many broadcasting of messages.

Think you can’t say anything meaningful in 140 characters? Think again. Not only are twitterers innovating clever forms of one-liners, haiku, quotes, and humor, but they’re including links in 23 percent of all tweets by one measure and links carry a lot more information and context. Writing 140-character messages seems trivial. But headlines and very short advertising copy are famously hard to do really well and known to be powerful.

The idea of Twitter sounds simple even a little too simple. But when you think that millions of people around the world are posting Twitter messages, following other people’s Twitter streams, and responding to one another, you can start to see the significance behind Twitter’s appeal. True, Twitter can look like it’s full of noise. But once you find interesting people and accounts to follow, your Twitter stream shifts from a cascade of disjointed chatter to one of the most versatile, useful online communications tools yet seen that is, if you take the time to learn to use that tool correctly.