What is Twitter?

Description:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

On Twitter, you share information in short bursts - 140 characters or less, to be exact. This doesn't leave much room for verbosity, so the content is very targeted. But with millions of people "tweeting" at any given moment, the pace is lively.

If you're curious to try Twitter, go ahead. It takes a little practice and some time to get the hang of it, but you don't need any special skills except curiosity. Even my mom is on Twitter. Here are a few tips and tricks for getting started.

1. Create your account at -  http://twitter.com/  this is fast and free. Choose a username that is relatively short, since people will use that name to reply to you, and a longer name will eat too many characters from that 140 limit.

2. Find some people to follow. http://wefollow.com/ is a good directory of Twitter users, where you can see people classified by tags like "celebrity", "parenting", "mom", or "kids." You can also check out who other people are following by visiting their profile on Twitter. You can also go to  http://search.twitter.com/  and search for keywords that are interesting to you, then follow the people who are talking about them.

3. Twitter's popularity has sparked hundreds of useful applications designed to make Twitter easier to use, more intuitive, and more powerful. We like http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/  and http://hootsuite.com/. You can explore a list at  http://www.longest.com/2008/10/28/top-twitter-tools/ with top tools and applications and decide if any of them will be helpful for you.

For more information:

There is a  4-part series at blog.litmos.com  found here http://blog.litmos.com/2009/02/part-one-getting-started-on-twitter.html  about getting started with Twitter.

 Be forewarned: it can be addictive. See you on Twitter.

Watch a Video:   http://dotsub.com/api/smallplayer.php?filmid=3066&filminstance=3068&language=none

http://twitter.com/

• If you aren't familiar with Twitter, it is one of those things, like MySpace, that sounds totally ridiculous and stupid when you first hear about it. But once you start using it, you realize how much fun it is.

  Eric Nuzum, Author of The Dead Travel Fast

• Suddenly, it seems as though all the world's a-twitter.

  Newsweek

• I really like Twitter.

  Jeff Barr, Amazon.com, Senior Manager