pogoism

Twitter is probably most simply defined as micro-blogging, or, if you’re familiar with Facebook, status updates on steroids.

Twitter is simple – when you log in, it asks you one question: “What are you doing”. Responses are limited to 140 characters and typical answers range wildly. Essentially, Twitter helps to fill the gap between blogs, or emails. You can update, or “tweet” from a variety of sources, desktop applications, such as Twitterific, mobile phone apps, such as TwitterFon, from Facebook, or straight from the Twitter website. This flexibility goes a long way to making Twitter what it is.

A lot of people say that they don’t care what people are doing every second of every day, and it’s a fair point. However, I’m not sure what it is, but I like the idea. I follow people on Twitter who I know in real life as well as people who I’ve never met. Of the people I’ve never met, I usually follow people that I find interesting and that have similar interests to me.

Twitter has been around for about 2 years, and recently it’s popularity has surged. Some pundits have suggested that in the last few weeks and months, Twitter has come of age, citing the Mumbai terrorist attacks as a turning point, when information was being uploaded to Twitter faster than the news agencies were able to.

If you don’t use Twitter, I’d strongly suggest you give it a go. Go to the Twitter homepage, sign up for an account, and the search for people in your town or city. If you find anyone that seems interesting, follow them. That’s the way to get started, if you don’t follow anyone, you won’t get anything out of it. After a while, more and more people will begin to find your profile and follow you, and other Twitterers will begin to interact with you. The key thing is to stick with it. Don’t give up after a few days – you’ll find it’s well worth it.

The lovely people at CommonCraft have done a much better job of explaining Twitter in plain english. Watch the video below.

And when you’ve set up your account, be sure to follow me.